The Bush administration bet big on Musharraf over the past eight years and got at best a frustrating and disappointing return on its investment. Musharraf backed the United States in the war on terror when he had to, but he lost control of virtually all of Pakistan's huge North-West Frontier province to Pashtun Islamists who support the Taliban movement in Afghanistan.

On the one hand, Musharraf allowed the United States to use Pakistani air bases and gave it permission to fly U.S. Air Force transport aircraft over Pakistani territory to supply the 36,000 U.S. troops and their NATO allies currently fighting the resurgent Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan.

But at the same time, the Taliban was able to operate across the border from Pakistan's North-West Frontier province with increasing and eventually total impunity and has been stripping power and credibility from Afghan President Hamid Karzai's U.S.-backed figurehead government in Kabul with almost ridiculous ease.

The one thing the coalition of opposition parties in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, were agreed on was their determination to eject Musharraf and restore civilian rule. This has happened on previous occasions in Pakistan's 61-year history of independence, and in the past the transition has always worked relatively smoothly. But circumstances this time are very different.

On earlier occasions, there was usually a single dominant civilian political leader who could take over from the army: This time, there are two rival ones, and they fight like cats and dogs.

The Pakistan Muslim League-N, led by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, is hugely distrustful of the United States because it backed Musharraf so enthusiastically for so long. However, the PML-N needs the cooperation of the rival Pakistan Peoples Party, led by former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto until her assassination last December. It is now spearheaded by her widower, Asif Ali Zardari.

The Bush administration wants Zardari to become prime minister, just as it previously bet on his wife, Bhutto. But Sharif hates Zardari like poison.

Critics charge Bush and his policymakers with failing to push Musharraf to develop his country's economy effectively. Pakistan has become an increasingly desperate economic basket case during the years of Musharraf's rule, and widespread poverty, economic frustration and unemployment have fed the spread of Islamist fundamentalism in the nation of 150 million people.

There has been widespread speculation where Musharraf will go: He probably will want to stay in Pakistan and plot against Zardari and Sharif, both of whom he loathes. He also enjoys a close personal relationship with his handpicked successor as army chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

However, Kayani finally stood aside and left Musharraf without effective support in the final political battle that led to the president's resignation. Also, Musharraf may fear that Zardari in particular will try to put him on trial for being involved in some way in Bhutto's assassination. He is most likely to move to Saudi Arabia if he has to leave the country, though Turkey has been mentioned as a possibility as well.

The future remains hugely uncertain. Sharif could not prevent the army led by Musharraf toppling him from power in October 1999, and he never gave much sign of tackling Pakistan's underlying problems when he was prime minister anyway. Zardari has never been a political leader in his own right and only owes his prominence to being Bhutto's husband. He and Bhutto were also reviled during their time in power for their alleged enormous corruption.

One possibility is that Zardari may agree to accept a politically powerless figurehead position as president, leaving the real power with Sharif. But U.S. policymakers are likely to encourage Zardari to push for the prime minister's post to keep Sharif out. A U.S.-backed Zardari may get on better with Army Chief of Staff Gen. Kayani. Senior army officers would like to wriggle out of fighting the Taliban in the tribal areas of the northwest, because the army has been losing badly in that conflict.

The only things that seem certain are that Pakistan will remain unstable, the Taliban will continue to effectively rule the northwest of the country, and the power of the central government in Islamabad will continue to weaken.