The Good News Coup?

Military coups used to be messy affairs, rife with panic and barricades and bloodshed. After the overthrow of the democratically elected government in Pakistan last week, there was cheering. In the span of 48 hours, army chief General Pervez Musharraf detained Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, sacked the Cabinet, suspended Parliament and the constitution, and imposed virtual martial law. Yet most Pakistanis barely shrugged. Shops remained open. Telephone service was restored. Children went to school. In Sharif's hometown of Lahore, people danced in the streets and distributed candies to celebrate the coup. "We don't want democracy," said Mohammed Tariq, 22, a taxi driver in the capital, Islamabad. "We just want law and order and stable prices."

As the country fell under total army rule late last week, few Pakistanis regretted the snuffing out of democracy. Militant Islamists tied to Afghanistan's Taliban government hailed the downfall of Sharif, who had suddenly clamped down on fundamentalist groups inside Pakistan following a three-week spasm of sectarian violence that left 40 dead. "There should be no elections in Pakistan--there should be a Taliban-like system in Pakistan," said the chief of the Harkatul Mujahideen, a militant group whose training centers were attacked by U.S. cruise missiles last year. Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, twice sacked for alleged corruption, praised the junta for removing Sharif and told TIME she might return from exile in London once army rule is lifted. "I'd like to go back," she said, "but not to add to the commotion."

The exuberance of Pakistanis was understandable. Their country is drowning in $32 billion of foreign debt, and Sharif had behaved like a petty tyrant. "People were so fed up," said former President Farooq Ahmad Khan Leghari. "They thought a weight had been taken off them."

Even in Western capitals, the usual jitters were tempered by widespread relief that Sharif was gone. Although U.S. Ambassador William Milam met with Musharraf to inform him of Washington's "profound regret about the military takeover," the U.S. was not all that upset by last week's events. The Asian subcontinent has been a source of heightened anxiety for the U.S. since the spring of 1998, when India tested nuclear devices and Pakistan responded with its own nuclear tests. The two countries' dispute over the territory of Kashmir brought them to the brink of all-out war this year. The Administration prodded Sharif to scale back his army's adventurism in Kashmir and exacted his cooperation in cracking down on terrorist training cells in Afghanistan. But Washington had come to believe that Sharif was digging his own grave and dragging his country into it. "Things were basically falling apart," says former CIA chief Robert Gates. "It had been a steady, slow, downward spiral."