Word: musharraf
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Democracy, even in diluted form, can shock, undo and turn over the?established order, as it did in both Pakistan and Kashmir last week. For President Pervez Musharraf, the election was intended to fulfill his promise to end one man rule?while ensuring he retained his own stranglehold on power. Early returns, however, indicated a fundamentalist coalition, the Mutahidda Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), was the unintended beneficiary of Musharraf's banning of past political powerhouses Benazir Bhutto and Mian Mohammed Nawaz Sharif from standing for office. The startling result calls into question Musharraf's grip on power and his ability...
...Just over the border in Pakistan, Musharraf was stung by the success of Kashmir's poll. He loathes the prospect of Kashmiri acceptance of India's rule, which the successful election suggests. (State-run Pakistan TV dubbed it "a farce and a sham.") In his own election, he managed to tame Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party and Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League. Together, they won less than half the places in the 342-seatNational Assembly. But unofficial estimates put voter turnout for the polls at around 30%?less than in Kashmir. And Musharraf failed to anticipate the rise...
...wrath. With the two big parties in retreat, the hard-line religious coalition is leading a whole lot of voters to the booths. Polls indicate that the MMA could win 30 to 50 of the 270 National Assembly seats. (Another 70 seats are reserved for women and minorities, a Musharraf innovation.) That is nowhere near a majority. But in a splintered Parliament, it could be enough to give the clerics a few berths in a future coalition government. From there, the clerics could snipe and demand radical Islamic changes in schools and social programs...
...clerics have a long litany of gripes against the Americans and Musharraf, whom they dismiss as "an American agent" and "a puppet." They resent him for allowing the U.S. to use Pakistani military bases in Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier province as staging posts in its Afghan campaign. It angers them that agents of the fbi wiretap Pakistani telephones and organize raids on suspected al-Qaeda hideouts. The Islamic hard-liners even fret that cameras at the Karachi airport are feeding images into CIA computers. What riles them most is that Musharraf has buckled to U.S. pressure and scaled down...
...Musharraf has plainly given the religious groups more free rein in the campaign than he has allowed the two big parties that were his main rivals. In Jhang city, in Punjab province, Maulana Azam Tariq, leader of an outlawed extremist group called Sipah-e-Sahaba, which has been linked to numerous sectarian killings, is being allowed to run as an independent?despite election laws that disqualify any candidate who has criminal charges pending, or even those who did not earn a college degree. "It makes no sense that Benazir can't run in the election," says one Islamabad-based diplomat...