WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 (UPI) -- Coalition politics is "always a messy process," said Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, as he explained the helter-skelter confusion that followed the exit of strongman Pervez Musharraf. After nine years of unchallenged power, Musharraf had taken a leaf from France's late President Charles de Gaulle's playbook, which held "the graveyards of the world are full of indispensable people," and he got out of Dodge ahead of the impeachment posse of political vigilantes out to depose him.

The country's two leading politicians, now in an uneasy, distrustful coalition, had powerful reasons to impeach Musharraf. Nawaz Sharif was himself deposed as prime minister by Musharraf in a bloodless 1999 coup. Asif Zardari, Benazir Bhutto's widower, had been kept in prison by Musharraf on a slew of corruption charges, none of which, he says today, led to a conviction.

At least not yet. As a test of the coalition's solidity, Nawaz demanded the return of the 60 judges and the head of the Supreme Court dismissed by Musharraf under emergency rule last November. But Zardari demurred. He feared that once restored to the bench, the old judiciary, whose anti-American proclivities are well-known, would dust off some of the corruption charges against him now that he is seen as Washington's new man in Islamabad.

So the messy coalition of Pakistan's two principal parties fell apart before it had even begun to govern. And Zardari is now in line to get elected president Sept. 6 by a majority of both federal houses of Parliament and the four provincial assemblies. Allied with a few smaller parties, the Pakistan People's Party, the country's largest, which Zardari inherited from his wife after she was assassinated in December, has enough votes to give him the same executive powers held by Musharraf.

If all goes well -- or badly, depending on one's viewpoint -- Zardari, who was suffering from serious mental illnesses, according to court documents filed by his New York doctors, will become president of one of the world's eight nuclear powers.