New York: Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, who bet his future on a post- September 11 alliance with the West, has lost "considerable popular support as he has forced a series of dramatic changes in the country at the behest of his foreign allies", a media report said on July 5.

"Nine months after joining the Western coalition against terrorism, Musharraf is isolated in his own land, increasingly a figure of ridicule and the focus of a growing anti-Western fury that is shared by Islamic militants and the middle class alike," the paper said.

"The decline in the General's fortunes represents an abrupt turnaround since last autumn, when he was hailed at home and in the West as a reform-minded Muslim leader in the mold of ‘Ataturk’, the founder of modern Turkey and one of the General's heroes," it said.

"Musharraf's dutiful carrying out of Washington's demands is galvanising a widespread feeling here that he has largely traded away Pakistan's sovereignty to the US and that Pakistan's new policy towards Kashmir is the latest in a series of humiliations he has endured at America's hands," it said.

PTI