Why did I feel a tiny twinge of regret when I saw the resignation speech of Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf?

I have written repeatedly calling for the strongman to go, and was mostly glad to see him leave. I have also lauded the remarkable nonviolent mass movement—led by Pakistan’s brave lawyers—that eventually did Musharraf in. But I wasn’t able to celebrate as wholeheartedly as I thought I would, for a number of reasons.

For one, he left more gracefully than any other of Pakistan’s dictators, albeit after a slightly prolonged final act. His was the first publicly announced resignation of any of Pakistan’s rulers—dictator or democrat. It’s an admittedly low bar but is something that has to be assessed in the context of Pakistan’s politics.

Second, he wasn’t ostentatiously corrupt. He did not lead a lavish lifestyle, and there has been no hard evidence that he amassed an illicit fortune. There were allegations of corruption toward the end, but they were a bit much when you consider the source.

“Amidst the hullabaloo, there was one hugely diverting moment last week that reminded one of pots and kettles,” writes Tariq Ali, perhaps the most acerbic commentator on Pakistan today. “Asif Zardari, the caretaker-leader of the People’s Party who runs the government and is the second richest man in the country (funds that accrued when his late wife was prime minister) accused Musharraf of corruption and siphoning official U.S. funds to private bank accounts. For once, the noise of laughter drowned the thunder of money.”

Third, he did get the Pakistani economy functioning again. Under his democratic predecessor, Nawaz Sharif, things were falling apart, and Musharraf launched the economy on a fairly high growth pattern. But here, he was limited by his technocratic free-market approach, which precluded any far-reaching structural changes, such as badly needed land reform. In the end, the contradictions of his model were too much to handle, and the recently installed democratic government inherited an economic mess, including runaway inflation and severe power shortages.

Fourth, he was not a fundamentalist, unlike Pakistan’s previous military dictator General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. In fact, under Musharraf, cultural life flourished and the media thrived (until his last, most awful year in office).

“I am deeply ambivalent” about Musharraf, said Mohsin Hamid, one of Pakistan’s best novelists, in an interview two years ago. “There’s freedom in the media, an explosion of TV channels, kids doing things I couldn’t dream of. Lahore, Karachi—the cities have a new vibe.”

Much of this phenomenon was despite Musharraf, not because of him, but at least unlike Zia, he didn’t try to foist socially repressive decrees on the people. In fact, he undid (though not completely) one of the most misogynist laws that Zia had passed, which deemed rape as adultery unless four adult male witnesses saw it happen. Musharraf also introduced some other progressive measures.

“He made a couple of good moves when he restored the women's reserved seats in parliament and introduced 30 percent women's seats at the district level, as well as striking down the ‘separate electorate system’ that divided voters on religious grounds,” writes Beena Sarwar, a feminist Pakistani journalist and filmmaker.

At the same time, the military under him colluded with fundamentalist outfits as a way of checkmating mainstream political parties and allowed them to take power in two of four Pakistan’s provinces, giving them free rein to impose their regressive notions on the hapless people of these regions.

He did rule with a lighter touch than past Pakistani autocrats, but there wasn’t an absence of repression. His security forces “disappeared” hundreds of people in the war on terror and in the government’s campaign against nationalism in the province of Baluchistan. Journalists came under increasing assault in his final years in office. He dismissed more than 60 judges, including the Supreme Court chief justice, and imposed a state of emergency last year. And the lawyers’ movement that formed to demand the reinstatement of these judges was subjected to severe attack, including dozens of supporters killed in May 2007 by members of a political party in the city of Karachi, with the connivance of local authorities.

“Ongoing human rights concerns in Pakistan include arbitrary detention (including of lawyers and human rights defenders); lack of fair trials; mistreatment, torture and enforced disappearances of terrorism suspects and political opponents; harassment, intimidation and censorship of the media; violence against women; and discrimination against religious minorities,” stated Human Rights Watch in a submission to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

His foreign policy was also characterized by paradoxes. The United States showered money on him (as much as $22 billion, by some estimates) and got little in return. He did capture and hand over many Al Qaeda operatives and (reluctantly) deployed security forces to go after jihadists in the tribal areas. But his policy was double-faced, since he was reluctant to cut ties with Taliban, in the hope that he could eventually use them to again consolidate Pakistan’s hold on Afghanistan.

“Musharraf continued to provide cover to the Taliban, but still managed to convince the Americans for many years that it was not a double game,” says Ahmed Rashid, one of the most perceptive Pakistani analysts, in the New York Times. “It was a remarkable feat of balancing on the tightrope.”

He displayed the same contradictions toward India. He put forth innovative proposals to solve the festering problem of Kashmir that has plagued relations between these nuclear-armed neighbors. But he was unwilling to stop the training and arming of militants who slipped across the border into Indian Kashmir and engaged in acts of terrorism.

“The former president supported soft borders with India in Kashmir,” writes Siddharth Varadarajan in The Hindu newspaper in India. “But he was also soft on the extremist elements that threaten the security of India, and now Pakistan too.”

Mostly for good, the autocrat who was backed by the Bush Administration almost right till the very end has departed the stage. It’s time for a complete rethinking of U.S. policy toward the country. A proposed bill by Senator Joseph Biden, which would grant Pakistan $7.5 billion in developmental aid over the next five years, is a good place to start. The Pakistani people—and their new, democratically elected government—need all the help they can get to stay out of the clutches of yet another military despot, since he may even lack the few fine points that helped leaven Musharraf’s dictatorship.