ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s usually fractious coalition government moved decisively for the first time on Thursday to impeach President Pervez Musharraf, who has been an important American ally in the campaign against terror but who has largely been pushed to the sidelines since his party lost elections in February.
“It has become imperative to move for impeachment against General Musharraf,” said Asif Ali Zardari, the head of the Pakistan Peoples Party, sitting beside Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-N, at a noisy news conference.
The two, leaders of the main parties in the governing coalition, have barely been on speaking terms in recent weeks, but they joined together in saying that Mr. Musharraf would be required to face a vote of confidence in the National Assembly, By calling for the vote, they were essentially giving the president an opportunity to step down gracefully before having to confront impeachment proceedings.
As president, Mr. Musharraf — who seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999 — still has the constitutional power to fight back against the impeachment by dismissing Parliament.
But to do so he needs the agreement of the army, said Tariq Azim Khan, a former minister of information in Mr. Musharraf’s government and an ally of the president.
In an indication of the gravity of threat against him, Mr. Musharraf canceled Thursday his planned trip to Beijing to attend the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.
The sudden cohesion of the coalition and the decision to try to remove Mr. Musharraf comes against the backdrop of a serious economic crisis in the country, a surging Taliban insurgency and popular sentiment that the four-month-old government has failed to deal with the urgent problems facing the country.
It appeared that the two leaders found that the only way they could keep the coalition intact was to attack Mr. Musharraf, something Mr. Zardari had been reluctant to do.
Mr. Zardari, who took up the leadership of the Pakistan Peoples Party after the assassination in December of his wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, is a beneficiary of an amnesty on corruption charges arranged last year and agreed to by Mr. Musharraf.
Mr. Zardari and Mr. Sharif had been closeted in back-to-back meetings for the last two days on how to keep their coalition together.
Meanwhile, as the impeachment proceedings have appeared increasingly likely, Mr. Musharraf has mobilized his political forces to consider his choices, spending three hours Thursday with his constitutional lawyer, Sharifuddin Pirzada.
After the news of the impeachment plans, a former member of Parliament, Ishaq Khan Khakwani, who resigned from the Musharraf cabinet last year, suggested that the coalition government could not find the answers to Pakistan’s problems in impeachment. Mr. Zardari was unleashing a process that could cause more turmoil, Mr. Khakwani said.
“An elected government was meant to bring stability, unfortunately it is destabilizing Pakistan,” Mr. Khakwani said. “No matter whether impeachment succeeds or not, Mr. Zardari has wriggled out of the deal brokered by Benazir Bhutto.” According to politicians who have seen Mr. Musharraf recently, the president has declared he would not go easily.
Mr. Musharraf argues that he was elected to his current five-year term in a democratic process last October, according to the politicians.
But the ruling coalition government disputes the legality of that vote, which was held by the outgoing Parliament and provincial assemblies — bodies that were dominated by the president’s supporters. Moreover, the coalition says that Mr. Musharraf acted unconstitutionally by declaring a state of emergency last November and dismissing nearly 60 judges, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court.
The most logical pocket of support for Mr. Musharraf remains the Pakistani Army, which he headed from October 1999 until last November.
His successor as military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, has repeatedly indicated in the last few months that the army would stay out of politics, a relatively rare phenomenon in a country where the military has ruled for more than half of its 61 years of independence. Mr. Musharraf’s insistence on holding both the main civilian and military leadership posts was a central point to the opposition that built against him in recent years, and he finally relinquished the military post after being reelected to the presidency late last year.
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