"I don't believe", asserts Pervez Mush-arraf, Pakistan's president, "in showing left and hitting right." It is a characteristically combative metaphor from a man who presents himself, with charming affability, as a straight-talking soldier with no patience for artifice. What you see, his bearing insists, is what you get. Yet what you get is an enigma: a deft politician, who claims to stay aloof from the political fray; an exponent of a moderate, liberal Islam, who panders to extremists; a professed democrat, who at the end of last year broke a promise to shed his uniform and rule as a civilian; one, moreover, who now seems to want to hang on to power after his presidential term expires in 2007.
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