Pakistan Premier Frees Judges

Leader's First Step Defies Musharraf

By Candace Rondeaux
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, March 25, 2008; A01

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, March 24 -- Pakistan's newly elected prime minister ordered the release Monday of top judges who had been under house arrest since last year, a dramatic challenge to the U.S.-backed president, Pervez Musharraf.

Moments after being confirmed as prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gillani declared, before a raucous Parliament now controlled by the president's opponents, that the judges would be freed immediately. The move was a step toward reinstating the country's once-independent judiciary, whose silencing by Musharraf fueled the opposition's pro-democracy campaign.

Hundreds of jubilant Pakistanis converged on the Islamabad home of the detained former chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, as police began removing barricades and barbed-wire fences. Banging drums, waving flags and shouting, "Go, Musharraf, go!" the crowd massed beneath the balcony of Chaudhry's house and urged him to make his first public address in more than four months.

Chaudhry, who was fired last year when he and other Supreme Court justices refused to accept Musharraf's suspension of the constitution and declaration of emergency, subsequently appeared on the balcony to greet the throng.

"I and my colleagues were unconstitutionally confined under house arrest," said Chaudhry, accompanied by Aitzaz Ahsan, president of the Supreme Court bar association. "I am thankful to the whole nation -- lawyers, civil society, everyone. Your great struggle for the constitution and the rule of law will continue."

Gillani, 55, was a close associate of Benazir Bhutto, the opposition leader who was assassinated in December. After lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to name him prime minister, he strode to the front of the assembly amid boisterous anti-Musharraf chants. He shook hands with Bhutto's tearful son and political heir apparent, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, then struggled for several minutes to be heard as members of Parliament stood and pounded their tables.

"God willing, I assure you as the leader of this house that we will strengthen this institution," Gillani said. "We have spent a long time in opposition. We came here after a long struggle."

Restoration of the judiciary in Pakistan has been at the center of a battle between Musharraf's government and the nation's leading opposition parties. The former chief justice was reinstated by the Supreme Court in July, but Musharraf reversed that decision through an executive order four months later. Chaudhry, his family and five other Supreme Court justices had been under house arrest since November, when Musharraf disbarred about 60 judges to head off potential legal challenges to his rule.

The moves set off a constitutional crisis that prompted a firestorm of protests by lawyers across the country and stoked support for the opposition, which swept to power in February elections.

In addition to ordering the judges' release, Gillani called for a U.N. investigation into the assassination of Bhutto, who was killed Dec. 27 in a gun and bomb attack on her motorcade as she was leaving a political rally in Rawalpindi.

Gillani, who spent five years in prison on corruption charges lodged by Musharraf's government, also demanded a parliamentary resolution to apologize for the 1979 hanging of Bhutto's father, former president and prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

Musharraf is scheduled to swear in Gillani as prime minister on Tuesday. Gillani then is expected to start naming cabinet ministers.

Gillani's party, the Pakistan People's Party, and the party of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif have vowed to pass a resolution to fully reinstate the dismissed judges within 30 days of the formation of the new government. That move could lead to a major confrontation with the president. Musharraf could face charges of treason -- an offense punishable by death -- should the judges be restored.

But Musharraf's attorney general has said the judges can be reinstated only if the constitutional changes introduced by Musharraf last year are repealed. That would require a two-thirds majority vote of the combined National Assembly and Senate.

"This is the beginning of a new era in Pakistan," said Ali Sajid, 45, a university professor who was among the crowd outside Chaudhry's house. "We are excited that the judiciary is free and has been released from the clutches of the United States of America. They should allow us to determine our own future." He said the United States and Britain "have no right to interfere in our politics."

U.S. support for Musharraf in the face of the year-long judicial crisis and growing concerns about Pakistan's involvement in the U.S.-led war on terrorism in the region have provoked sharp discontent, particularly among the country's burgeoning middle class. U.S. officials in recent months have shied away from directly supporting the judges' reinstatement, saying only that the decision to restore the judiciary rests with Parliament.

Musharraf's opponents see the release of the judges as the first step toward the restoration of an independent judiciary and a sound rebuke of U.S. support for his rule of more than eight years.

The judges' release appeared to bring relief to the hundreds of police officers who have stood guard along the road to Chaudhry's home for months. Several officers shook hands with the same protesters at whom they had lobbed tear gas a week ago. Some smiled and laughed as they helped black-coated lawyers pick their way across the small field of barbed wire lining the road.

"The prime minister has given his order and has spoken it on the floor of Parliament," said one officer, who declined to give his name for fear of losing his job. "We all are tired of doing this. We knew it was wrong, but all the same it's a job requirement. We had to follow orders."

New Pakistani Leaders Tell Americans There’s ‘a New Sheriff in Town’

By SALMAN MASOOD

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The top State Department officials responsible for the alliance with Pakistan met leaders of the new government on Tuesday, and received what amounted to a public dressing-down from one of them, as well as the first direct indication that the United States relationship with Pakistan would have to change.

On the day that the new prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gillani, was sworn in, Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte and the assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, Richard A. Boucher, also met with the Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, whom they had embraced as their partner in the campaign against terrorism over the past seven years but whose power is quickly ebbing.

The leader of the second biggest party in the new Parliament, Nawaz Sharif, said after meeting the two American diplomats that it was unacceptable that Pakistan had become a “killing field.”

“If America wants to see itself clean of terrorists, we also want that our villages and towns should not be bombed,” he said at a news conference here. Mr. Sharif, a former prime minister, added he was unable to give Mr. Negroponte “a commitment” on fighting terrorism.

The statements by Mr. Sharif, and the cool body language in the televised portions of his encounter with Mr. Negroponte, were just part of the sea change in Pakistan’s domestic politics that is likely to impose new limits on how Washington fights militants within Pakistan’s borders.

That fight, which has recently included American airstrikes in the lawless tribal areas where the Taliban and Al Qaeda have made sanctuaries, has become widely unpopular, particularly in the last few months as a surge in suicide bombings here has been viewed as retaliation for the American attacks.

Asif Ali Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, also met with the Americans but did not speak to reporters afterward. Husain Haqqani, an adviser who attended the meeting with him, said, though, that the American officials had been given notice that the old ways were over.

“If I can use an American expression, there is a new sheriff in town,” Mr. Haqqani said. “Americans have realized that they have perhaps talked with one man for too long.”

Neither Mr. Negroponte nor Mr. Boucher spoke publicly about the meetings, but the Pakistanis said the Americans expressed willingness to work with the new government.

Mr. Sharif and Mr. Zardari boycotted the swearing-in of Mr. Gillani as prime minister by Mr. Musharraf at the presidential palace, another sign of their determination to sideline Mr. Musharraf.

Distancing himself from Mr. Musharraf, Mr. Gillani, moments after taking the oath of office, said, “We have to give supremacy to the Parliament so that we can jointly take the country out of these crises.”

He later received a call from President Bush offering congratulations. According to Mr. Gillani’s office, Mr. Gillani told Mr. Bush that “Pakistan would continue to fight terrorism in all its forms” but that a “comprehensive approach” was required, “combining a political approach with development programs.”

The new chief of staff of the Pakistan Army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, also seemed to eager to show he was his own man, relieving two generals on Monday who had been close to Mr. Musharraf.

The timing of the American visit was harshly criticized in the Pakistan media for creating the appearance that the United States was trying to dictate policy to a government not even hours old. The two American diplomats met Mr. Sharif as Mr. Musharraf administered the oath of office to Mr. Gillani.

“I don’t think it is a good idea for them to be here on this particular day,” said Zaffar Abbas, the editor of the English-language newspaper Dawn. “Here are the Americans, right here in Islamabad, meeting with senior politicians in the new government, trying to dictate terms.”

An editorial on Tuesday in The News, one of Pakistan’s most-read English dailies, was headlined “Hands Off Please, Uncle Sam.” The Americans should understand, the editorial said, that the newly elected Parliament was now their proper partner, not Mr. Musharraf.

An aide to Mr. Sharif, Ahsan Iqbal, said Mr. Sharif told Mr. Negroponte that the strategy of the partnership against terrorism needed to be reassessed. “Nobody supports terrorism, but there are different ways to counter it,” Mr. Iqbal said.

“Mr. Sharif asked Mr. Negroponte if he thought that using the military was the only solution,” Mr. Iqbal said. “Mr. Negroponte agreed that there are other dimensions that can be adopted.”

Some of those questioning the American visit noted that Pakistan had been an ally of the United States since its independence 60 years ago. Still, they added, many Pakistanis now resented that the campaign against terrorism dominated the relationship.

Washington should learn from the outcomes of the election last month in which Mr. Musharraf’s party was trounced and an alliance of religious parties in the North-West Frontier Province, adjacent to the tribal areas, was also defeated, said Javangir Tareen, the leader of a faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, who was a member of Mr. Musharraf’s early cabinet.

“The people have spoken and rejected the religious parties, and at the same time they have rejected the people who will automatically nod to the United States,” Mr. Tareen said.

An independent analyst on the Pakistani military, Shuja Nawaz, who lives in Washington, said Pakistani officials had told him they discouraged the American diplomats from coming this week.

But the Pakistanis were told that Mr. Negroponte was on a trip that included other already arranged stops and that Tuesday was the only possible day for him. Mr. Nawaz called the visit “ham-handed,” and said it could be seen as Washington wanting to keep acting as the “political godfather behind Musharraf.”

The American Embassy in Islamabad said that the two diplomats would stay in Pakistan until Thursday, and that they would meet other officials on Wednesday, though the embassy declined to identify them.

The changes in the military hierarchy by General Kayani seemed intended to display his independence from Mr. Musharraf, who appointed him chief of the military in December. General Kayani reassigned two of the most important corps commanders, the 11 powerful generals in charge of regional posts: Lt. Gen. Shafaat Ullah Shah, the corps commander of Lahore, Pakistan’s second biggest city; and Lt. Gen. Sajjad Akram, the corps commander at Mangla on the Indian border.

Pakistan’s Leaders Try New Approach to Militants

By JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Faced with a sharp escalation of suicide bombing in urban areas, the leaders of Pakistan’s new coalition government say they will negotiate with the militants believed to be orchestrating the attacks, and would use the military only as a last resort.

That talk has alarmed American officials, who fear it will mean a softening stance against the militants just as President Pervez Musharraf, an ally in the war on terror, has given the Bush administration a freer hand to strike at them using unmanned Predator drones.

Many Pakistanis, however, are convinced the surge in suicide bombings — 17 in the first 10 weeks of 2008 — is in direct retaliation for three such Predator strikes since the beginning of the year. The spike in attacks, combined with Mr. Musharraf’s crushing defeat in February elections, has brought a new mood in Pakistan: that there should be a change from his American-backed policies.

It is this atmosphere that the leaders of Pakistan’s new government coalition — Asif Ali Zardari of the Pakistan People’s Party, and Nawaz, Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League-N — want to capitalize on. Speaking in separate interviews, the two men sought to repackage the conflict in a more palatable way for Pakistanis, and to strike a more independent stance from Washington.

Though short on details, they said they were determined to set a different course from President Musharraf, who received generous military financial help of more than $10 billion from Washington for his support.

“We are dealing with our own people,” said Mr. Sharif, who was twice Prime Minister of Pakistan in the 1990s. “We will deal with them very sensibly. And when you have a problem in your own family, you don’t kill your own family.

“You sit and talk,” he added. “After all, Britain also got the solution of the problem of Ireland. So what’s the harm in conducting negotiations.”

For his part, Mr. Zardari said: “Obviously what they have been doing for the last eight years has not been working. Even a fool knows that.”

The war against the insurgents had to be redefined, he said, as “Pakistan’s war” for a public that has come to resent the conflict as being pushed on the country as part of an American agenda. It should be dealt with by talks and the use of a beefed up police force rather than the army, he said.

Washington has opposed past negotiations on the grounds that short term peace deals between the militants and the Pakistani military were a sign of weakness that resulted in the militants winning time to fortify themselves.

The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said on a visit here last month that talks with the militants, were not helpful in the “short term.”

In general terms, according to a retired senior Pakistani general who remains close to the current military leadership, new negotiations would likely involve a ban on non-Pakistani militants — such as Afghans, Uzbeks, Chechens — coming from southern Afghanistan into Pakistan in return for reduced operations by the Pakistani army in the tribal areas.

But precisely how those talks would be different from the negotiations that led to failed peace deals under Mr. Musharraf was not entirely clear, except that negotiators would represent the newly elected government rather than the military government of the last eight years.

Neither Mr. Zardari nor Mr. Sharif was specific about whom among the militant groups in Pakistan’s tribal areas they favored talking to. Nor was it clear what kind of formula or quid pro quo the two political leaders had in mind for talks.

Mr. Sharif, whose Islamic religious background is conservative, refused to say whether he would negotiate with Baitullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban leader whom the government blames for many if not most of the recent suicide bomb attacks in Pakistan.

American and Pakistani terrorist experts have said they believe that Mr. Mehsud was behind the assassination of the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in December, and that he works in tandem with Al Qaeda. “Nobody gave me any presentation on this subject,” Mr. Sharif said.

Asked who the negotiations would be held with, Mr. Sharif replied: “With all the concerned elements. I don’t think guns and bullets have so far produced any positive results.”

Any result that smacks of Pakistan ceding further control over the tribal areas is not one likely to be welcomed in Washington. The Bush administration views the tribal areas as a sanctuary for Taliban forces who cross the border into Afghanistan to fight American and NATO forces, as well as a base for Al Qaeda to plot new terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe.

Pakistanis, however, have come to see the tribal areas as something entirely different: a once peaceful region where a group of militants have turned their wrath on the rest of the country as punishment for the American alliance.

Many civilians are among the 274 people killed since the beginning of the year, but the dead also include young soldiers and policemen, according to a tally by the Pakistani newspaper, Dawn. A bomb explosion at an Italian restaurant favored by foreigners in Islamabad last Saturday injured four F.B.I. agents, and underscored for Pakistanis yet again the American involvement here.

Washington may have little choice but to adjust to the new policies, a retired army brigadier, Mehmood Shah, who was in charge of security in the tribal areas, said.

Of the new Pakistani government, Mr. Shah said: “They will not like to be seen as dictated to by the United States, they would like it to be seen as ‘our war.’ ”

Mr. Shah, who met with Admiral Mullen when he was in Islamabad, said there was a popular sense in Pakistan — prevalent on television talk shows as well as the halls of parliament — that it was time to “keep a distance from the United States.”

As Pakistan’s new leaders fashion their strategy, however, they will unavoidably be dealing with programs devised by Washington to help Pakistan regain control of the lawless tribal areas. In some places, the approaches may yet dovetail.

For instance, one element of the stepped-up American aid effort is a $400 million plan to train the Frontier Corps, an under funded paramilitary force that is used to patrol the border with Afghanistan.

Mr. Sharif said he had heard about the plan, expected to begin in October, but had no details.

Mr. Zardari favored employing such a force over relying on the army, which he said was the “wrong instrument” to use against the militants. “We need to use the police force,” he said. “They had few guns, made in 1952. You have to upgrade them. You have got to give them modern technology and they will stand better than anybody else.”

Mr. Sharif, who is regarded as a nationalist — he gave the go ahead for the explosion of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb in 1998 — said he was not in favor of foreign aid. “I think frankly we should rely less on aid,” he said. “It makes us, you see, lazy. We should generate our own resources.”

Both men stressed that the new parliament, which held its first session this week, would be consulted on the strategy toward the insurgency, a sharp distinction from the go-it-alone behavior of Mr. Musharraf, who until last year served as both head of the army and president.

The two leaders have made much of the fact that they received a broad mandate in the elections last month. To that end, they said, they would revive the role of parliament.

As an example of the docile legislature, a recent report of the parliament’s committee on defense for the last four years consisted of 67 pages. The panel was apparently so short of funds, the report was published with funding from the United States Agency for International Development whose logo appears on the last page.

The only mention on the war on terror was a resolution by the committee in 2007 criticizing the United States for threatening to link the amount of aid to Pakistan to the performance of the army.

Another important distinction from the past is that the new government would not use “the same tainted network of agencies and the army who have created this” situation, said one of Mr. Sharif’s senior lieutenants, Nisar Ali Khan, who has relatives in prominent positions in the army.

“The new start won’t be with them,” he said. “It has to be a multifaceted operation with the tribal chiefs who are operating in the area.”

Both parties have long accused Pakistan’s intelligence agencies of backing militant groups even as the government has been forced to negotiate with them. Many of the groups were used to pressure India and Afghanistan, but have more recently turned their fury back on Pakistan as they have become more radicalized.

Those intelligence agencies will almost certainly have new leadership chosen by the new prime minister. Whether fresh faces at the top will mean change in the ingrained behavior of the agencies is an open question, however.

The head of the Inter Services Intelligence agency, Lt. Gen. Nadeem Taj, a relative of Mr. Musharraf, is likely to be replaced in the coming months, Pakistani officials said. The head of the Intelligence Bureau, another powerful agency, Ijaz Shah, a confidant of Mr. Musharraf, resigned this week. His replacement will be named by the new prime minister, who is expected to be named on Monday by Mr. Zardari.

Mr. Zardari is not immediately eligible to become prime minister himself because he did not run for Parliament. But it is likely he will do so in the coming months and then assume the mantle.

Leading Pakistani Parties to Form Government

Sharif and Zardari Pledge to Reinstate Judges Ousted by Musharraf

By Candace Rondeaux
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 10, 2008; A11

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, March 9 -- The heads of Pakistan's two leading political parties vowed Sunday to form a coalition government and restore the country's embattled judiciary by returning judges deposed last year to the bench within a month.

Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari, widower of former prime minister and opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, called for the country's newly elected Parliament to adopt a resolution reinstalling about 60 judges.

"The restoration of the deposed judges, as it was on the 2nd of November 2007, shall be brought about through a parliamentary resolution to be passed in the National Assembly within 30 days of the formation of the federal government," Sharif said after a marathon meeting between members of his Pakistan Muslim League faction and Zardari's Pakistan People's Party.

The announcement, at a televised news conference in the northern Punjab town of Murree, came as hundreds of lawyers protested in cities across Pakistan to mark the one-year anniversary of a decision by President Pervez Musharraf to remove the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry.

Chaudhry's removal and the disbarment of dozens of other judges touched off a constitutional crisis and sparked widespread instability in the nuclear-armed nation of 164 million. The political crisis worsened considerably, however, after Musharraf on Nov. 3 declared a state of emergency and placed the chief justice and several other prominent judges and lawyers under house arrest. The next month, after the emergency was lifted, Bhutto was assassinated while campaigning.

In Islamabad, the capital, about 500 lawyers and their supporters marched Sunday to Chaudhry's home to demand an end to his four-month house arrest. Waving black flags, dozens shouted for Musharraf, the former army chief, to be hanged. Several protesters tried to cut through a barbed-wire barricade on the road near Chaudhry's home.

Hundreds of police in riot gear fired tear gas into the crowd.

"This day marks the day last year when the general thought he would get rid of the chief justice, but he was sadly mistaken," said Masood Sharif Khattak, a director of Pakistan's intelligence bureau under Bhutto who participated in the protest. "There's no way this country can move forward on any political path unless and until the judiciary is restored."

Protests for the restoration of the judiciary have become routine since Chaudhry's dismissal. On Saturday, hundreds of black-suited lawyers led by Aitzaz Ahsan, the Supreme Court bar association president, marched in a marketplace in the nearby garrison city of Rawalpindi to kick off a week-long protest over the judiciary, dubbed "Black Flag Week."

Ahsan has been campaigning for the restoration of the judiciary since his release two weeks ago from months under house arrest in Lahore. The firebrand lawyer has called for the judges' immediate reinstatement through an executive order. Zardari and Sharif have called for Parliament to decide the judges' fate.

Although winners have been declared for all but a handful of seats in the 342-member National Assembly, Parliament has not yet been convened. Musharraf said Friday that he would summon the first session in two weeks.

Pakistan Rivals Join to Fight Musharraf

By JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The leaders of the two major political parties, in an unexpectedly strong show of unity against President Pervez Musharraf, agreed Sunday that they would reinstate judges fired by the president and would seek to strip him of crucial powers.

The power sharing deal, announced by Asif Ali Zardari, the leader of the largest party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, and Nawaz Sharif, the head of the Pakistan Muslim League-N, represented another tough challenge to the already waning authority of Mr. Musharraf, a favorite ally of the Bush administration.

The two men, appearing at a news conference together in the resort area of Bhurban, said they would seek to remove the president’s power to dissolve the Pakistani Parliament and his power to appoint the chiefs of the military services. Together, the two parties control just shy of two-thirds of the Parliament after an election last month in which Mr. Musharraf’s party was routed.

The agreement settled key differences that had clouded the post-election atmosphere.

Mr. Zardari, the widower of the slain party leader, Benazir Bhutto, had appeared to waver on Mr. Sharif’s insistence that the judges be reinstated.

For his part, Mr. Sharif had indicated that members of his party would not sit in the cabinet while Mr. Musharraf remained in power.

But on Sunday, Mr. Sharif, reading in English a “summit declaration” said: “The coalition partners are ready to form the governments and the national and provincial assemblies should be convened immediately.”

Mr. Sharif, who was twice prime minister in the 1990s, said his party would participate in a cabinet that would be dominated by Mr. Zardari’s choices. He appeared to swallow the idea that his cabinet members would have to take the oath of office from President Musharraf, an act that Mr. Sharif had said he would oppose.

Mr. Sharif was overthrown in October 1999 in a bloodless military coup by Mr. Musharraf, who was then an army general, and he holds a particular enmity against the president, who he says should resign. Mr. Musharraf stepped down as the head of the army in December.

One of the biggest threats to Mr. Musharraf’s dwindling authority was Sunday’s agreement on restoring the justices, whose dismissal Nov. 3 under an emergency order spawned an energetic anti-Musharraf lawyers movement.

In the last few days, the lawyers had started to mobilize again on behalf of Chief Justice Mohamed Iftikhar Chaudhry and other judges, who have remained under house arrest for the last four months after their dismissals.

After Sunday’s joint announcement, a lawyer who is active in the movement, Athar Minallah, said he was now confident the justices, including Mr. Chaudhry, would be reinstated. “I don’t see any hurdle in the restoration of the judges now,” Mr. Minallah said. “It’s a positive day for democracy in this country.”

The reinstatement of the dismissed judges of the Supreme Court and four High Courts in the provinces represents a special danger to Mr. Musharraf because they would likely be presented with petitions seeking to overturn the president’s re-election in October, lawyers said.

The lawyers movement, led by Aitzaz Ahsan, has argued that Mr. Musharraf’s re-election by the national and provincial assemblies while he held the post of army chief was unconstitutional.

A senior lawyer in Mr. Sharif’s party, Ashtar Ausaf Ali, said Sunday that he had readied a draft of the resolution that Mr. Sharif and Mr. Zardari said Sunday would be passed by a simple majority within 30 days of the opening of Parliament.

The draft resolution has been approved by senior members of both parties, Mr. Ali said. It refers to the firing of the judges and says in part that it “resolves to undo all illegal and unconstitutional and immoral acts of the usurper and calls upon the chief executive to take all necessary measures for redeeming the honor of the judges and reversing extra constitutional measures.”

The “usurper,” Mr. Ali said, was a reference to Mr. Musharraf.

The other efforts to weaken Mr. Musharraf’s authority were contained the “Charter for Democracy,” a document that Mr. Sharif signed with Ms. Bhutto when the two were in exile several years ago.

The charter is aimed at bringing Pakistan back to a parliamentary system of government that was initially conceived when the country was founded 60 years ago. Under the eight years of Mr. Musharraf’s military rule, the power of the presidency has grown at the expense of Parliament.

In particular, Mr. Musharraf secured a constitutional amendment in 2002 that gave him the right to dissolve Parliament. The Charter of Democracy that the two leaders endorsed Sunday calls for that presidential prerogative to be abolished.

But in order to reverse the 2002 amendment, the Parliament needs to pass a new constitutional amendment, and that requires a two-thirds majority, Mr. Minallah said.

At the moment, the two major coalition partners appear to be 10 votes short of that majority. The strength of Sunday’s accord was likely to attract independents and smaller parties to the anti-Musharraf cause in the parliament, Mr. Minallah said.

The 2002 constitutional amendment under which Mr. Musharraf won the right as president to appoint the chiefs of the military services would also be overturned, Mr. Ali said. The right to appoint the army chiefs would be handed back to the prime minister.

One question that remained unsettled Sunday was the choice of prime minister.

As the leader of the party with the most seats in Parliament, Mr. Zardari would choose the prime minister from his party, Mr. Sharif said.

The names of several prominent politicians belonging to the Pakistan Peoples Party and holding parliamentary seats in the powerful Punjab province have been floated in recent days as possible nominees.

They include Ahmed Mukhtar, a commerce minister in the second government of Ms. Bhutto, and the head of the Servis Group, an industrial conglomerate based in Punjab Province.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Emphasizes U.S. Role in Pakistan

By THOM SHANKER

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, arrived here Monday to emphasize America’s eagerness to help Pakistan in its fight against foreign terrorists and home-grown militants operating in the northwestern tribal areas.

Admiral Mullen said the United States was willing to offer assistance for such things as training, transport helicopters and night-combat operations, but stressed that he was carrying no specific proposals on this visit and would await formal requests from Pakistan’s military.

The trip here by Admiral Mullen, America’s highest-ranking military officer — his second here in less than a month — underscored Washington’s view of the vital role Pakistan plays in the global counter-terrorism effort.

But it also highlighted the delicate nature of the relationship between the two countries in which the United States cannot be seen as dictating combat missions on Pakistan’s sovereign territory. This is especially true as the nation struggles to form a new government after a humiliating election loss for the ruling party of President Pervez Musharraf, a close Bush administration anti-terror ally.

“This military-to-military relationship is really critical,” Admiral Mullen said. He summarized his message to Pakistan’s military leadership as: “We are anxious to assist. Tell us where you need assistance.”

During his visit here, Admiral Mullen will meet with Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who last year became Pakistan’s new army chief, a pillar of national power, when Mr. Musharraf gave up that post to serve solely as a civilian president. The admiral will also meet with Gen. Tariq Majid, chairman of the Pakistani Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee.

Speaking to reporters aboard his airplane as he flew into Pakistan after a two-day inspection tour of Iraq, Admiral Mullen was asked whether General Kayani was at risk of being seen as too close to the United States.

“One of the messages that I want to make sure that I am very consistent with is: We are there to assist where he wants us to assist,” Admiral Mullen said.

Admiral Mullen did not discuss any of the various proposals now being drawn up by the American military to assist Pakistan.

But one American plan described by senior officials and now under review by the United States military’s Central Command would send about 100 troops to help train the Frontier Corps, a Pakistani paramilitary force that both nations describe as the vanguard in the fight against Al Qaeda and Taliban groups in the restive tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.

During his visit last month, Admiral Mullen met with the head of the Frontier Corps.

As he arrived in Pakistan on Monday, the admiral said the United States had developed “a fairly comprehensive plan” of assistance to the Frontier Corps, a force of about 85,000 that is recruited from ethnic groups on the border and thus know the region’s dialects and culture.

“There are needs in helicopters,” Admiral Mullen said. “There are needs to operate at night.”

He emphasized that those needs are in training and maintenance skills, and made no mention of American troops entering Pakistan to conduct combat missions, nor even to join Pakistan forces on such operations.

The Pentagon already has spent about $25 million to equip the Frontier Corps with equipment, including vehicles, radios and surveillance devices, and plans to spend another $75 million over the next year. Administration officials say the United States will spend more than $400 million over the next several years to help the Frontier Corps enhance its combat capabilities.

Pakistan elections put Bush's efforts into question

Two victorious opposition parties may not embrace U.S. anti-militant aims. Some critics fear Washington will interfere on Musharraf's behalf.
By Paul Richter and Laura King
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

February 23, 2008

WASHINGTON — The legislative elections that radically reshuffled political power in Pakistan this week also have thrown the Bush administration's efforts in the country into even deeper disarray.

The election handed new power to two opposition parties that are at best ambivalent about Washington's chief interest in the South Asian country: the military pursuit of Islamic militants.

And it gave rise to widespread suspicions that U.S. officials are maneuvering to preserve the dwindling power of their chief ally, President Pervez Musharraf. The administration has invested $10 billion in foreign and military aid to Musharraf's government since 2001, much of it to encourage Pakistani counterinsurgency efforts.

The elections concentrated the country's parliamentary seats among members of the party of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated late last year, and the party led by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The outcome greatly reduced the influence of Musharraf's party.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday that the Bush administration would continue to deal with Musharraf as president but that it was up to Pakistanis to organize their government.

The White House is viewed in Pakistan as the former general's chief protector, and Washington's staunch support for him during six weeks of emergency rule last year, a period widely seen as martial law, is recalled with resentment.

Pakistani news outlets have stoked public outrage with reports suggesting that U.S. officials have secretly worked to assure Musharraf's continued power. Citing reported contacts between U.S. and Pakistani officials, critics have charged that U.S. officials tried to derail a deal between Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party and Sharif, or at least to block moves to impeach Musharraf.

On Friday, U.S. Ambassador Anne W. Patterson and a delegation led by U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R- Texas) met separately with Musharraf and Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto's widower, who now heads her party.

On Wednesday, President Bush, traveling in Africa, telephoned Musharraf, whom he has described as a friend and ally.

Musharraf, for his part, made clear his reliance on American help by appealing for continued U.S. support in an op-ed article published Friday in the Washington Post.

Some Pakistani newspapers sharply criticized Zardari for one meeting with Patterson at the U.S. Embassy after the elections. Reports have suggested that Zardari was being pressured to reach an accommodation with Musharraf.

Analysts said that the perception of U.S. interference was fueling anti-American sentiment and feeding a sense that the vote's implication, with only 15% supporting Musharraf's party, was not fully grasped in Washington.

"The Americans have clearly gone beyond the role of monitoring the post-election climate; they are trying to influence events in a way that is completely unacceptable," said political analyst Nasim Zehra.

U.S. officials are publicly urging the Pakistani political parties to work with Musharraf, but describe the contacts as normal diplomatic business at a time of electoral change.

Western diplomats acknowledge that Pakistanis want Musharraf to step down, but also point to public concern over potential instability if he is abruptly forced from the political scene.

"All along, the idea has been that it was best not to knock everything over at once," said a diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity because of lack of authority to speak publicly on Western policy toward Musharraf. "The idea is that with the new government, the presidency is less and less important."

Even after Zardari and Sharif announced Thursday that their parties would form a coalition, U.S. officials and analysts in both countries pointed to uncertainty over the final power structure.

U.S. officials privately acknowledge that there are questions about how eager the new government will be to continue the counterinsurgency mission. The officials are wary of Sharif because of what they believe are ties to extremist groups, though supporters insist that he has none. And although Zardari has proclaimed that Pakistan must fight terrorism, he is expected to focus more on domestic issues.

Zardari "is not a particularly strong leader," said Daniel Markey, a State Department official until last year and now a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations. "He's not likely to have much of a sense of how to confront the problem."

During an unpredictable political transition, the counterinsurgency effort will become "an awful lot harder," Markey said, especially if there are purges among military and intelligence officials who have been key U.S. partners. But over the longer term, U.S. officials should be able to persuade the new government to battle extremists, just as it persuaded a once-reluctant Musharraf, he believes.

Other analysts point out that polls show that most Pakistanis prefer to deal with militants through economic and political means, rather than with military force.

Arif Rafiq, an analyst at the New York-based Pakistan Policy Blog, predicted that the new civilian leadership would impede U.S. efforts to get the tactical cooperation it needs to fight the militants in the tribal areas. And that, he said, "may lead some people in Washington to look more favorably on unilateral action."

paul.richter@latimes.com

laura.king@latimes.com

Richter reported from Washington and King from Islamabad, Pakistan.

Choosing Which War to Fight

The Candidates
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON

TWO weeks ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a surprise trip to Afghanistan that was so cloaked in extra security and secrecy that reporters traveling with her weren’t told where they were going until her plane had taken off from London.

Arriving in Kabul, Ms. Rice’s entourage was immediately hustled across the runway to a gray C-17 military transport plane for a one-hour trip to Kandahar, where she stayed for less than three hours, never venturing off the airfield where NATO forces have their headquarters. Then it was back to Kabul for lunch with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in his barricaded palace. A mere eight hours after landing in Afghanistan, Ms. Rice was gone. She had spent, all told, only six hours on the ground; her plane, with its distinct blue and white United States of America logo, made a swift, steep ascent, disappearing from rocket range within minutes.

The secrecy and security that surrounded Ms. Rice’s visit highlight a central question that has now thrust its way into this year’s presidential campaign: Six years after the United States invaded Afghanistan with the goal of rooting out Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the terrorist threat, Afghanistan remains a security danger zone for Americans, far more so than in 2002, the year in between the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

So, has Afghanistan now become a bigger security threat to the United States than Iraq?

The three leading contenders for the presidential nominations have staked out positions that differ radically, along party lines. All three say they believe that Afghanistan is an important security threat that needs to be addressed. But the Republican, John McCain, suggests that Iraq remains America’s bugaboo of security threats, while the two Democrats, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, appear to have moved on to Afghanistan. Both of them argue that focusing on Iraq gets in the way of a more serious threat in Afghanistan.

Senator McCain, the likely Republican nominee, makes a de facto argument that Iraq and Afghanistan are two sides of the same coin. “Senator Clinton and Senator Obama will withdraw our forces from Iraq based on an arbitrary timetable designed for the sake of political expediency and which recklessly ignores the profound human calamity and dire threats to our security that would ensue,” Mr. McCain said in a Feb. 7 speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Distilled to its simplest form, Mr. McCain’s argument is that withdrawing from Iraq would make Americans less safe in the long run, because a withdrawal would embolden Al Qaeda, put American interests at risk in the Middle East, and make an already volatile region less safe.

Senators Obama and Clinton have tacked in the opposite direction. Iraq, they argue, makes Afghanistan more dangerous. The Iraq war, Mr. Obama told an audience of supporters in Houston last Tuesday, “distracted us from the fight that needed to be fought in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda. They’re the ones who killed 3,000 Americans.” He has said that if elected, he would deploy at least two additional brigades in Afghanistan.

Senator Clinton, who has been to Afghanistan three times, holds a similar position, her aides say, except they say that she hasn’t specified how many additional brigades she would send to Afghanistan because she wants to further explore the security situation there first. Mrs. Clinton has proposed appointing a special envoy to deal with the Afghanistan/Pakistan border.

“There is a theater of war, that I would call AfPak, with two fronts — an eastern front and a western front,” said Richard Holbrooke, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations and a supporter of Mrs. Clinton’s. “I believe that we will look back ten years from now and say that AfPak was even more important to our national security than Iraq.”

For the Democrats, who have a base of support that clearly wants out of Iraq, framing the issue in terms of Afghanistan makes it a lot easier, politically, to pull out of Iraq. But leaving Iraq will be no easy thing. Experts who side with Mr. McCain argue that a quick American exit from Iraq could lead to a conflagration in the Middle East that could end up involving Saudi Arabia and Iran in a Shia-Sunni-Kurd war — a conflict that would have few winners and would likely produce an enormous number of civilian casualties.

Beyond that, the logistics of pulling out 130,000 troops from Iraq would be daunting, and it could take close to a year to get all the equipment out. Indeed, some military experts say that if the United States military was given a year to exit Iraq, it would be so consumed with the logistics that it wouldn’t be able to do anything else.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates entered the fray earlier this month, for a moment sounding almost like the (gasp!) Clinton and Obama camps by urging Europeans to draw a distinction between the wars. During remarks on his way to Munich to take the Europeans to task for not sending enough troops to support NATO in Afghanistan, Mr. Gates said part of the problem was that many Europeans were conflating Iraq with Afghanistan.

“I worry that for many Europeans the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan are confused,” Mr. Gates said. “I think they combine the two.” It was an unusually candid acknowledgment from a senior member of the Bush administration that the war in Iraq had exacted a cost, in NATO’s chances for victory in Afghanistan. Many Europeans, Mr. Gates said, “have a problem with our involvement in Iraq and project that to Afghanistan, and do not understand the very different — for them — the very different kind of threat.”

The problem is, with the United States Army stretched thin in Iraq, the Bush administration has, thus far, been left to hector its NATO allies to send additional troops to handle the growing Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. And European populations generally disapprove of their troops being sent into harm’s way in Afghanistan. No surprise, given the opposition on the streets of Europe to the American invasion of Iraq. That’s what Mr. Gates means when he says that Europeans conflate the two: Why help the United States in Afghanistan, the European logic goes, when America would be able to handle Afghanistan much more easily if its G.I.’s weren’t bogged down in Iraq?

In any case, the dynamics of the two conflicts are not the same, many foreign policy experts stress. The rapidly deteriorating situation on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, the Musharraf government’s increased inability to confront Islamist insurgents in its border provinces, combined with the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan have turned AfPak into America’s No. 1 national security problem, these experts say, even as parts of Iraq seem to have quieted since more American troops were sent there last year. Conditions in Pakistan became even more volatile on Monday after the party of President Pervez Musharraf suffered a drubbing in parliamentary elections, leading some to question how long Mr. Musharraf will be able to cling to power and how much of his already diminished authority he can retain. And Pakistan, the experts say, is inextricably linked to Afghanistan.

“Losing Afghanistan would be far more consequential than losing Iraq,” says Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor who was an adviser on counterterrorism to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad in 2004. “If Pakistan, especially along the border, fell into complete disarray, the integrity of the Afghan country and its government will be even more threatened, and that would have far greater repercussions for us.”

Propping Up the Weak as a Policy

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON

JUST how much President Bush’s goals abroad are now at the mercy of some of the world’s weakest leaders was clear last week in how the White House reacted to events in Pakistan.

Quietly, the administration cheered on an alliance of convenience between a once-unchallenged strongman, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and an exiled former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, whose turns in office in the 1980s and 90s were widely viewed as a mixture of incompetence, powerlessness and suspected corruption.

The administration was betting that a Musharraf-Bhutto combination, however fragile, would be the best bet for keeping a nuclear-armed state from descending into violence that could end Mr. Bush’s last hopes of wiping out Osama bin Laden’s sanctuary.

General Musharraf is just one example of weak leadership. Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, has let pro-Shia loyalties inhibit progress toward the power-sharing compromises with the Sunnis. The Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas failed to rein in Hamas and end the endemic corruption in his own party when he first won power two years ago. And President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, whose authority over warlords is still a matter of daily challenge, now faces a resurgent Taliban.

If the nemesis of Mr. Bush’s first term was the Axis of Evil, the bane of his last 17 months in office may be the Nexus of Weakness.

The driving question inside the White House is how to build up these weak leaders or maneuver around them, at a time when arms sales, aid programs and presidential photo-ops yield diminishing returns.

A senior official said last week that in recent meetings, “Every once in a while you heard a debate about whether it’s time to cut one of these guys free — particularly Musharraf and Maliki. Then someone in the back of the room would ask, ‘Then what?’ ”

There are agonized searches for other alternatives, and the limited choices in Iraq were played out for more than an hour on Friday in the secure Pentagon room where the Joint Chiefs of Staff meet. Much of the talk, administration officials said, concerned how Mr. Bush could work around Mr. Maliki and reward Sunnis in Anbar Province for their recent decision to start shooting at Al Qaeda in Iraq, instead of at Americans forces.

The discussion included how to encourage early elections that would put Sunnis in government posts and how to get the central government to finance more projects in the region.

“It quickly became a discussion of the political and economic rewards we can encourage, rather than the math of how many forces we need to keep there,” said one official. He wondered aloud whether the United States would still be in Iraq if “we had the same conversation four summers ago.”

That point — how late in the game it is — also preoccupies Washington.

The administration’s critics and its war-weary veterans alike agree that using America’s remaining leverage in each place requires matching American promises of help with tangible results. For example, Mr. Bush has talked about bringing reconstruction to those countries. But the delivery has failed.

“Timing is to statecraft what location is to real estate,” said Dennis Ross, a Middle East expert who served under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and whose book, “Statecraft” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) lays out what he sees as missed opportunities.

With Mr. Abbas, he said, “We had a chance right after his election” in 2005, “and we didn’t show a sense of urgency, for example helping find way to lower 40 percent unemployment.” The Islamic movement Hamas exploited that and won the subsequent election, he said.

“Karzai is a weak leader whose problem from the beginning was that he needed a way to take on the warlords,” he continued. “We didn’t deliver with the kind of reconstruction that the president promised, or a way for him to extend his authority and writ beyond Kabul. And so he had to start cutting deals with everyone.”

Of course, missteps in Washington only contribute to a leader’s weakness; rarely do they cause it. Would General Musharraf’s suddenly tenuous position in Pakistan be stronger had the Bush administration given him the one thing he asked for most urgently after 9/11? He wanted duties on Pakistani textiles lifted, an action opposed by textile-manufacturing states here. It seems a stretch to think that lower duties would have made him more able to trap Qaedists in their Pakistani lairs today.

On the other hand, it is reasonable to ask whether things would be different in Iraq, Afghanistan or the Palestinian territories had the administration had what Henry Crumpton, the former C.I.A. officer who helped oust the Taliban in 2001 and became the counterterrorism head at the State Department, calls an “expeditionary foreign service” that could help nations create courts, central banks and job programs.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sees the logic of that.

“I think we’ve begun to build that rudimentary capability, but it’s frankly something that the country has probably needed since the Balkans” in the mid-1990’s, she said a few weeks ago.

“You have to have a civilian capacity to do it,” she said. “And that’s the capability we’re trying to build now.”

A big problem, though, is that the leaders Mr. Bush wants to embolden know that Mr. Bush cannot promise anything past 12:01 p.m. on Jan. 20, 2009. Every day they calculate their own moves accordingly.

Mr. Maliki made the calculation out loud last week. Angered by the crescendo of calls in Washington for his ouster — by Democrats and Republicans — he warned that Iraq had “other friends” who “will support us in our endeavor.” He was clearly talking about Iran.

Political Ally Says Musharraf Will Quit Army Post

By CARLOTTA GALL

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Aug. 31 — The president of Pakistan’s ruling party, one of President Pervez Musharraf’s closest political allies, said Friday that General Musharraf would resign from his post as chief of army staff before parliamentary elections scheduled for the first week of January, but said he would run for re-election as president in the coming weeks, while still in uniform.

On Wednesday, a former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, said the general had agreed to resign from the military before running for re-election as part of their negotiations for a power-sharing deal. On Thursday, government officials said he had made no such deal.

The comments on Friday by the party chief, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, made it clear that the general’s intention to resign his military post was unrelated to the negotiations with Ms. Bhutto. He said the driving factor behind the general’s decision to resign was the newly independent Supreme Court and the likelihood that the chief justice would declare his continued military rule unconstitutional.

At the same time, the president would not risk resigning his military post before his re-election to another presidential term was assured, he said.

“If the chief justice attacks him, he can stay as army chief,” he said. “These are our recommendations. Nothing is final.” The timetable laid out by Mr. Hussain was the clearest indication of General Musharraf’s plans as his presidential term and a constitutional amendment allowing him to hold the dual posts of army chief and president both expire.

“He will take off the uniform before general elections” for a new Parliament over the winter, Mr. Hussain said in an interview at his residence here. Some supporters were urging the general to keep his military post, Mr. Hussain said, but he was among those urging the general to relinquish it.

“People say ‘don’t,’ but I am very sure that he will,” he said. General Musharraf will announce the date of his military resignation after standing for re-election by the electoral college in coming weeks, he said.

If that plan falls through, Mr. Hussain outlined a “last option,” which was to delay the presidential election, dissolve Parliament and call parliamentary elections, which would leave the president and prime minister in place until a new Parliament was elected in two or three months.

According to Pakistani law, General Musharraf has to stand for re-election by the national and provincial assemblies between Sept. 15 and Oct. 15 — no more than two months and no less than one month before his term expires Nov. 15 — and parliamentary elections have to be held by mid-January. An amendment allowing him to serve simultaneously as president and army chief runs out on Dec. 31.

The chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, was suspended by General Musharraf in March, but was reinstated in July after enormous public protests. He remains the real obstacle to General Musharraf’s re-election, Mr. Hussain said. “Whenever we try to think of some allowance, at once the chief justice comes in front,” he said. An aide to Mr. Hussain who was present at the interview described the chief justice’s mood as “vengeful.”

Mr. Hussain said efforts were under way to reach out to Mr. Chaudhry. “He should behave like a judge,” he said.

Mr. Hussain accused Ms. Bhutto, who has led the opposition Pakistan People’s Party from exile, of trying to take credit for General Musharraf’s decision to resign his uniformed post, and said the discussions with her in London had stalled. He said the agreement with her was reduced to her early demands that corruption cases against her would be dropped and in return her party would abstain from, but not disrupt, the presidential election.

But General Musharraf still needed her cooperation, and that of another opposition leader, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, in passing a constitutional amendment that would allow him to get around the requirement that government officials be out of office for two years before running for election, Mr. Hussain said.

He admitted that time was running short, since the government would need at least five days to pass the amendment through both houses of Parliament before the president submitted nomination papers by mid-September.

Talks with Ms. Bhutto were continuing in London with the head of the National Security Council, Tariq Aziz, a trusted aide of General Musharraf, he said.

Mr. Hussain said his party was against Ms. Bhutto’s demand that the ban on prime ministers’ serving for the third time be lifted, which would allow her, as well as Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister ousted by General Musharraf’s 1999 coup, to run again for prime minister. She had also made new demands, he said, including the withdrawal of corruption charges against 11 of her close associates, the removal of the attorney general, the appointment of a new election commissioner and for herself to be made chairman of the Senate.

Mr. Hussain said there would not be any pre-election collaboration with the Pakistan People’s Party but did not discount a coalition, or a government of national consensus, after the election.

He lamented that the fortunes of General Musharraf had been damaged by the chief justice’s suspension. “Except for this judicial crisis, we were going in a very good way,” he said.

General Musharraf’s initiatives in fighting terrorism and handling Afghanistan had involved difficult and unpopular decisions but he had managed them well, he said. “One wrong thing has spoiled the whole,” he said. “Still, he is not afraid.”

Dozens killed, injured in renewed Pakistan violence

A suicide bombing and an attack by militants boost the toll to more than 250 deaths since government forces stormed a radical mosque last month.
By Laura King
Times Staff Writer

11:51 AM PDT, August 4, 2007

New violence flared today in Pakistan's rugged border region, where a suicide bombing and an attack by militants on an army checkpoint left at least 23 people dead and dozens injured.

More than 250 people have been killed in a wave of bombings and other attacks that began after government forces stormed a radical mosque last month in the capital, Islamabad.

Insurgent groups, many of which have their bases in the tribal belt straddling the Afghan border, have vowed to exact vengeance for the mosque assault, which left more than 100 people dead.

Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is under heavy pressure from the Bush administration to rein in the militants. But in his politically weakened state, some observers have questioned his commitment to an all-out battle in the frontier region.

The suicide attacker, driving a car packed with explosives, struck near a busy bus station in the town of Parachinar in the North-West Frontier province, which borders Afghanistan. The bomber apparently tried to ram into a bus packed with passengers but hit a vehicle next to it instead.

At least nine people were killed and more than 40 hurt in the blast, local officials said. Some of the most seriously injured were taken to the provincial capital, Peshawar, for treatment.

In the semiautonomous tribal region of North Waziristan, where a pact between militants and the government broke down last month, insurgents attacked a security checkpoint before dawn, setting off a firefight that lasted hours and left four soldiers and 10 militants dead.

Such attacks have become more brazen in recent weeks, and insurgents are using more and more sophisticated weaponry, military officials said.

Also today a senior opposition leader was released from prison, a day after the Supreme Court ordered that bail be granted while his case was reviewed.

Javed Hashmi, who had spent four years behind bars on charges of inciting mutiny, emerged to the cheers of supporters in the city of Lahore.

Before being sentenced to a 23-year jail term, Hashmi was a vociferous critic of Musharraf, who seized power in a coup eight years ago. Confrontation has been brewing for months between the general and an emboldened pro-democracy movement that has demanded that he relinquish his military role or step aside.

Hashmi, a member of the party of exiled former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, said he would immediately join forces with those seeking to oust Musharraf.

"There will be no compromise with dictators," he told reporters outside the jail. "I will only consider myself a free man when the entire nation will get freedom from these generals."

laura.king@latimes.com

Obama Says He Would Take Fight To Pakistan

By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 2, 2007; A01

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama issued a pointed warning yesterday to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, saying that as president he would be prepared to order U.S. troops into that country unilaterally if it failed to act on its own against Islamic extremists.

In his most comprehensive statement on terrorism, the senator from Illinois said that the Iraq war has left the United States less safe than it was before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that if elected he would seek to withdraw U.S. troops and shift the country's military focus to threats in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"When I am president, we will wage the war that has to be won," he told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson Center in the District. He added, "The first step must be to get off the wrong battlefield in Iraq and take the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan."

Obama's warning to Musharraf drew sharp criticism from several of his rivals for the Democratic nomination, but not from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.).

Obama delivered a biting critique of President Bush's conduct of the war in Iraq and of the administration's overall strategy for combating terrorism, while seeking to reassure Americans that his long-stated opposition to the Iraq war would not compromise his commitment to defending the country from the threat of Islamic extremists.

The muscular speech appeared aimed at inoculating him from criticism that he lacks the toughness to lead the country in a post-9/11 world, while attempting to show that an Obama presidency would herald an important shift in the United States' approach to the world, particularly the Middle East and nearby Asian nations.

The speech came a week after Clinton described Obama as "irresponsible and frankly naive" for saying during a Democratic debate that he would be prepared to meet during his first year as president with leaders of rogue nations without preconditions. That set off a days-long argument between the two over diplomacy and the use of the presidency.

Obama described Clinton's approach to diplomacy as "Bush-Cheney light." She described that comparison as "silly." Their differences on the issue of dealing with nations such as Iran, North Korea and Syria, however, appear not to be significant. Both favor a much more energetic and open diplomatic strategy than they say Bush has followed.

Much of Obama's speech yesterday focused on steps designed to reinvigorate U.S. diplomatic efforts to combat terrorism, but the most noteworthy proposals dealt with military actions. Obama said he would deploy at least two more brigades -- about 7,000 troops -- to Afghanistan to combat what he said is the growing Taliban influence there while sending the Afghan government an additional $1 billion in nonmilitary aid.

But he said he would tie U.S. military aid to Pakistan to that country's success in closing down terrorist training camps, in blocking the Taliban from using its territory as a staging ground for attacks on Afghanistan and in getting rid of foreign fighters.

"There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans," he said. "They are plotting to strike again. . . . If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

Obama offered no direct criticism of his leading rival for the Democratic nomination, but he indirectly rebuked Clinton and other Democrats who voted for the 2002 resolution authorizing the war. "With that vote, Congress became co-author of a catastrophic war," he said.

Clinton did not respond yesterday to the issue of her Iraq vote, but she sought to show her toughness on dealing with terrorist threats without endorsing the idea of raids into Pakistan. In an interview with American Urban Radio News Networks, she said that if there were actionable intelligence showing Osama bin Laden or other prominent terrorist leaders in Pakistan, "I would ensure that they were targeted and killed or captured." She also said she long has favored sending more troops to Afghanistan.

Other Democratic candidates took issue with Obama's tough talk on Pakistan.

"It is dangerous and irresponsible to leave even the impression the United States would needlessly and publicly provoke a nuclear power," Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) said in a statement.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, in a telephone interview, said that Obama's threat, if acted upon, could inflame the entire Muslim world. "My international experience tells me that we should address this issue with tough diplomacy first with Musharraf and then leave the military option as a last resort," he said.

Former senator John Edwards (N.C.) said in a statement that he would first apply "maximum diplomatic and economic pressure on states like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia" to do their utmost to combat the spread of terrorism. He also challenged both Obama and Clinton to block a proposed U.S. arms deal with Saudi Arabia.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, called Obama's threat misguided. "The way to deal with it is not to announce it, but to do it," Biden said at the National Press Club. "The last thing you want to do is telegraph to the folks in Pakistan that we are about to violate their sovereignty."

Obama said opposition to the war in Iraq should not lead Americans to turn their backs on threats of terrorism. "The terrorists are at war with us," he said. "The threat is from violent extremists who are a small minority of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, but the threat is real."

Beyond military measures aimed at defeating al-Qaeda, Obama outlined a series of other initiatives he would pursue to combat those threats. He repeated an earlier pledge to double U.S. foreign aid to $50 billion, said he would provide $2 billion to combat the influence of Islamic schools known as madrassas and launch a more ambitious public diplomacy initiative, which he promised to steer.

"As president, I will lead this effort," he said. "In the first 100 days of my administration, I will travel to a major Islamic forum and deliver an address to redefine our struggle."

Obama also called for additional steps to protect the homeland from possible attack and a reassertion of American values, promising to prohibit torture "without exception," close the terrorist prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and ensure that all intelligence gathering is done within the letter of the law.

Rekindling last week's debate with Clinton, Obama said he would bring a new approach to diplomacy. "It's time to turn the page on Washington's conventional wisdom that agreement must be reached before you meet, that talking to other countries is some kind of reward and that presidents can only meet with people who will tell them what they want to hear."

Pakistani court reinstates top judge

The unanimous ruling is a blow to Musharraf, whose grip has faltered amid a pro-democracy movement.
By Mubashir Zaidi and Laura King
Special to The Times

July 21, 2007

ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN — In a serious new blow to beleaguered President Pervez Musharraf, the Supreme Court voted unanimously Friday to reinstate Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, the outspoken jurist whose suspension four months ago galvanized a broad-based pro-democracy movement.

The dramatic development came amid the greatest turmoil in Pakistan since Musharraf seized power in a coup eight years ago. Nearly 200 people have been killed this month in suicide bombings and confrontations between Pakistani security forces and Islamic militants, which were ignited by the storming of a radical mosque in Islamabad, the capital.

The escalating political and military strife raises new questions as to whether Musharraf, considered a crucial U.S. ally in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, can retain his grip on power.

Chaudhry's reinstatement paves the way for judicial challenges to Musharraf's plan to extend his presidency in elections this year without giving up his post as army chief.

The court ruling was a stinging rebuke to Musharraf, who had sought in March to remove Chaudhry on misconduct charges. The justices declared the suspension illegal and, in a separate 10-3 vote, threw out the allegations of wrongdoing.

Rejoicing erupted outside the courthouse, with usually somber black-suited lawyers dancing in celebration and opposition party workers cheering the verdict. In cities across Pakistan, political activists and lawyers distributed sweets, a traditional token of celebration.

Chaudhry's chief counsel, Aitzaz Ahsan, called the court decision a "victory for the entire nation." Human rights activists also hailed the verdict.

"It's a great day for the rule of law in Pakistan," said Ali Dayan Hasan, a researcher for Human Rights Watch.

Musharraf gave no indication he would seek to challenge the ruling, either by legal or military means. Spokesman Rashid Qureshi said the Pakistani leader "respects the decision of the Supreme Court."

The president "stated earlier that any judgment the Supreme Court arrives at will be honored, respected and adhered to," Qureshi said in a statement.

The Bush administration, which has backed Musharraf throughout the crisis, pointed to the verdict as proof of judicial independence.

State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey said the ruling "speaks positively … that these kinds of issues can be resolved through the established institutions, through the rule of law."

Though the ruling is a grave blow to Musharraf's standing, some analysts believe that the confrontation with Islamic militants might help him regain his footing, at least temporarily.

The ongoing offensive against insurgents "buys him some time," said Robert M. Hathaway, director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

"He doesn't have to make any political decisions immediately, but at some point, attention will revert from the security arena back to the political one," Hathaway said. "I think he is one very unhappy general tonight."

Though the clash with Chaudhry made Musharraf deeply unpopular among Pakistani moderates, most of them supported the Pakistani leader's decision this month to send in commandos to storm the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, whose militant clerics had sent students on vigilante-style anti-vice raids. More than 100 people were killed in the mosque raid.

After threats of retribution from militants, Musharraf ordered the deployment of thousands of troops along the Afghan border, where insurgents have taken sanctuary. At the same time, though, the government is seeking through intermediaries to revive a controversial cease-fire that was abandoned by militants last weekend.

Four people were killed in a suicide car bombing in the North Waziristan tribal region Friday, and police defused a car bomb outside a crowded shopping center in the country's largest city, Karachi.

"We must all unite against the current wave of extremism and militancy," said Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz.

Even before the verdict, political rivals such as exiled former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had been pressing Musharraf to step aside as military leader and allow free elections — calls they are expected to renew.

Bhutto, whose Pakistan People's Party joined with lawyers across the country in organizing mass anti-government protests, declared in a statement that the case had become the rallying cry in "a struggle against dictatorship."

Nationwide protests against Chaudhry's suspension, during which the sometimes prickly jurist achieved rock-star status, were largely peaceful. But his supporters were twice the target of serious attacks.

In May, gunmen from a pro-Musharraf party fired on opposition party workers in the port city of Karachi, sparking violence that left more than 40 people dead.

On Tuesday, a suicide attacker struck a pro-Chaudhry rally in Islamabad, killing 18 people.

In the past, the Supreme Court and other Pakistani courts have often acquiesced to the wishes of the country's military rulers. Senior lawyers vowed that would no longer be the case.

"The ruling will set a precedent … that no one can curb the independence of the judiciary in the country again," said Munir Malik, president of the Supreme Court bar association and one of Chaudhry's attorneys in the case.

Some observers, however, said it remained to be seen whether the judiciary would again yield to political pressure on sensitive issues such as the fate of prisoners held without trial after being rounded up by police and intelligence agents for suspected terrorist links.

"The judiciary itself will be held to a much higher standard," said Hasan, the human rights activist. "We will see if they live up to it."

laura.king@latimes.com

Special correspondent Zaidi reported from Islamabad and Times staff writer King from Istanbul, Turkey. Special correspondent Zulfiqar Ali in Peshawar, Pakistan, contributed to this report.

Pakistan militants scrap cease-fire

A suicide bomber kills 26 at a police recruitment center. The death toll from weekend violence tops 70.
By Zulfiqar Ali and Laura King
Special to The Times

July 16, 2007

PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN — With more than 70 people killed in weekend bombings and a controversial cease-fire annulled in Pakistan's volatile frontier zone, the specter loomed Sunday of an all-out war between Islamic militants and the U.S.-backed government of President Pervez Musharraf.

In the latest suicide attack, a bomber blew himself up Sunday at a police recruitment center near Pakistan's tribal region, killing at least 26 people and injuring nearly 60 others.

The violence comes on the heels of last week's government storming of a radical mosque in the capital, Islamabad, a clash that left more than 100 people dead.

On Sunday, militants in North Waziristan, one of the tribal areas, announced they were scrapping a 10-month-old cease-fire accord with the government. That deal was already in tatters and had been widely criticized since its inception, but the militants' decision to end it indicated they wanted no impediment to an all-out fight with government forces.

The turmoil has heightened speculation that Musharraf, who is also the chief of Pakistan's military, might cite the growing threat posed by militants as justification for declaring a state of emergency and putting off elections scheduled for this year.

Before the mosque raid, Musharraf had been under pressure from a grass-roots democracy movement to renounce his army post and allow free and fair balloting. But public sentiment indicated support for his decision to use force on those holed up inside the mosque, which had become the center of a vigilante-style, anti-vice campaign.

That support has given the Pakistani leader something of a respite from the previous political crisis, but it also plunged him into what is shaping up as his government's most serious confrontation in years with militant groups. The groups have enjoyed the longtime patronage of Pakistan's intelligence establishment although Musharraf aligned his government with the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Islamic militant groups, most of them based in the lawless region bordering Afghanistan, have vowed to avenge the assault on the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque.

But the frontier zone has long been the focus of U.S. intelligence concerns about the regrouping and rearming of Al Qaeda and Taliban elements.

The Bush administration, which has expressed support for Musharraf during the mosque raid and months of democracy protests, offered new backing Sunday on his deployment of thousands of troops in and near the tribal areas.

"We are supporting that effort to get control of the situation," national security advisor Stephen Hadley said on ABC's "This Week," citing the threat posed by militants who find sanctuary in the borderlands.

Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden praised "martyrdom" in a video posted on a militant website over the weekend.

The attack on the recruitment center occurred in Dera Ismail Khan in North-West Frontier Province, which borders the South Waziristan tribal region, also a militant stronghold. The police are in the midst of a recruiting drive, and witnesses said the center was packed with job applicants taking written examinations and having medical checkups.

Trouble had been expected in Dera Ismail Khan, where three would-be suicide bombing suspects were arrested Friday. Authorities also seized an explosives-laden car.

The powerful explosion left the recruiting center's main reception area littered with charred corpses and groaning wounded. About half the dead were police officers and the remainder new recruits, authorities said.

Militants on Sunday issued fresh threats against police in the tribal areas, ordering them not to cooperate with the thousands of army and paramilitary forces deployed in the border zone after the Red Mosque raid.

Hours before the attack on the recruitment center, militants staged a sophisticated, multi-pronged assault on a military convoy traveling in the mountainous district of Swat, which lies in the North-West Frontier Province. The province also borders Afghanistan.

The convoy was hit near the town of Matta by two suicide bombers and a roadside bomb, military officials said. At least 18 people were killed and 48 hurt, including about seven civilians.

The force of the explosion shattered vehicles and destroyed half a dozen homes. Television footage showed bloodstained helmets amid the wreckage.

Security forces sealed off the area. Helicopter gunships hovered overhead, and residents said sporadic firing continued for hours afterward.

Until recently, the Swat district had been relatively quiet even though it was known to be a base for forces aligned with a radical mullah, Maulana Fazlullah. The militant leader, speaking Sunday on an illegally operated radio station, said he was going into hiding.

After the mosque raid, he had called on followers to wage war against the government.

The convoy attack was the second in as many days in the frontier zone. On Saturday, at least 26 soldiers were killed and more than 50 hurt in a suicide attack on their convoy north of Miram Shah, the main town in the North Waziristan tribal area.

Under the now-defunct truce between the government and tribal elders in North Waziristan, the Pakistani army had pulled troops back to their barracks. In exchange, the militants were supposed to have halted cross-border attacks against foreign troops in Afghanistan and also to have expelled foreign militants in their midst, but they failed to do so.

Militants had given government forces until Sunday to withdraw from several newly reestablished checkpoints in the Waziristan region, but that demand went unheeded.

Musharraf was accused by critics at home and abroad of appeasing the militants with the pact. However, there were indications his administration might try to negotiate another accord.

The government called a jirga, or conference, for today in Peshawar, the provincial capital. Tribal elders, senior clerics and government officials were to attend.

king@latimes.com

Aid to Pakistan in Tribal Areas Raises Concerns

By JANE PERLEZ

GHALANAI, Pakistan — The United States plans to pour $750 million of aid into Pakistan’s tribal areas over the next five years as part of a “hearts and minds” campaign to win over this lawless region from Qaeda and Taliban militants.

But even before the plan has been fully carried out, documents and officials involved in the planning are warning of the dangers of distributing so much money in an area so hostile that oversight is impossible, even by Pakistan’s own government, which faces rising threats from Islamic militants.

Who will be given the aid has quickly become one of the most contentious questions between local officials and American planners concerned that millions might fall into the wrong hands. The local political agents and tribal chiefs in this hinterland on the Afghan border have for years accommodated the very groups the American and Pakistani governments seek to drive out.

A closely scripted visit to the hospital here, used for a pilot project by the United States Agency for International Development, showed the challenges on full display. The one-story hospital here was virtually empty on a recent day.

Local people had no way to get there. Three of the 110 beds were occupied. Two operating tables had not been used in months. Many doctors had left because the pay was too meager and security too precarious, said Dr. Yusuf Shah, the chief surgeon.

Sher Alam Mahsud, the local political boss who escorted this reporter on a rare visit, said he wanted all the American aid money “delivered to us.” But the precarious security does not allow the Americans to assess the aid priorities firsthand, or to provide oversight for the first installment of $150 million allocated by the Bush administration.

“Delivering $150 million in aid to the tribal areas could very quickly make a few people rich and do almost nothing to provide opportunity and justice to the region,” said Craig Cohen, the author of a recent study of United States-Pakistan relations at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Yet it is here in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, as the region is formally called, that Washington is intent on using the development aid as a counterinsurgency tool, according to a draft of the Agency for International Development plan given to The New York Times by an official who worked on it.

The draft warns that the “severe governance deficiencies” in the tribal areas will make it virtually impossible for the aid to be sustainable or to overcome the “area’s chronic underdevelopment and consequent volatility.”

The ambitious plan was publicly highlighted during a visit to Pakistan in June by Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, as a measure of Washington’s support for Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

“The objective driving this decision is the hope that by bringing the FATA into the mainstream and assuring that basic human services and infrastructure are on par with the rest of Pakistan, the people of FATA would be less likely to welcome the presence of Al Qaeda and Taliban,” the draft states. The projects include health and education services, water and sanitation facilities, and agricultural development, it says, making clear that these are a means to a broader end. “The main goal of the United States government in relation to the FATA is counterterrorism,” it says.

One way to improve the chances of the aid’s efficacy would be greater emphasis on political reform in the tribal areas, according to the draft. The Pakistani government has created a panel to study reform of the political structure in the areas, the draft noted, adding that “Usaid should explore opportunities for contributing its substantial experience in local government capacity building to any reform efforts the government of Pakistan decide to undertake.”

Even if the tribal areas were not under the sway of the Taliban, which they increasingly are, the development challenge here would be steep enough, the document and interviews make clear.

The area, home to 3.2 million people, remains a desolate landscape where women are strictly veiled. Female literacy — at 3 percent — is among the lowest in the world. Schools are often used to run businesses. There is no banking system. Smuggling of opium and other contraband is routine.

The hostility to almost anything that smacks of foreign influence is such that money from the modest development agency program, administered by the charity Save the Children at the hospital here, was being delivered anonymously, undercutting any potential public relations benefit for the United States.

“We can’t do branding,” said Fayyaz Ali Khan, the program manager for Save the Children, in an interview in the city of Peshawar. “Usually we say the aid comes from the American people, but here we can’t.”

Suspicions about modern medicine are rife. A Pakistani doctor was blown up in his car in June after trying to counter the anti-vaccine propaganda of an imam in Bajaur, one of the tribal agencies, Pakistani officials said.

The Pakistani government has virtually no authority here. After years of fighting to assert its authority, at the cost of about 600 soldiers, it negotiated peace accords with tribal authorities that have all but confined Pakistani troops to their barracks.

Tribal elders, local imams and governors known as political agents — their title goes back to the British colonial days — are the on-the-ground arbiters of all decisions in many districts. The political agents are widely considered corrupt.

A senior American official in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, who would not speak for attribution, defended the plan’s goals as necessary and achievable. The official said that “Pakistani firms, consulting organizations and nongovernmental organizations” would be the main deliverers of the assistance.

The official said, referring to the international aid agency, that these would in turn be “managed under Usaid direct contracts and grants to American and international organizations.”

Mr. Cohen, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was skeptical. Almost every potential recipient of the money was suspect in the eyes of the people it was supposed to help, he said. “The notion that there’s going to be $150 million a year to Pakistani nongovernmental organizations who are going to be out in the open seems naïve to me,” he said.

“The insecurity of the area will require a heavy reliance on local partners” like Pakistani nongovernmental organizations to administer projects, he added. “But the nongovernmental organizations don’t trust the military, the military doesn’t trust the tribal chiefs, and the tribal chiefs won’t trust us unless they’re getting a cut of the money.”

Such Pakistani groups were often targets of the Islamic militants in the tribal areas. The militants are increasingly destroying CD shops and attacking small efforts to gain advantages for women.

Mr. Mahsud, the political agent for the tribal agency, or district, of Mohmand, where the hospital is, had his own ideas. Any aid money from Western donors should be “pooled here,” he said, during an interview at the FATA secretariat headquarters in Peshawar, meaning it should be distributed through local officials.

His power was evident when he drove in his impressive new four-wheel-drive vehicle through the heavy metal black gates that mark the boundary to his tribal agency. Armed men in heavy gray uniforms, wearing black felt berets in the summer heat, snapped to attention.

The hospital itself was barren, and silent. Dr. Shah, the chief surgeon, and other doctors who had come to the hospital for the visit of an outsider, said water was a luxury trucked in by tanker, arriving at best every other day.

One doctor, Aaquila Khan, brimmed with passion about helping the poor and feeble women who came to visit the woefully underequipped hospital, but she lives in Peshawar, more than an hour’s drive away, and so comes in just two or three days a week, mornings only, to treat those female patients.

“They are very much anemic,” she said of eight women she treated during a recent visit. “They are not educated, they are not aware of family planning, they have no money.” Only the women living within walking distance could come, she said.

The aid program run by Save the Children, a small $11 million starter project that hints at the bigger things planned by the Americans, formally began last December with a signing of a memorandum of understanding with the tribal authorities.

The idea is for Pakistani doctors to train health care workers who will go into the field and train traditional health assistants on more modern methods.

But the first training sessions have only just begun, said Mr. Khan, the program manager for Save the Children. The only sign of the program was a “resource room” with a large blond wood table and a dozen or so chairs still in their plastic wrapping.

The training sessions take place in Peshawar, over the tribal boundary, to ensure the safety of the doctors.

Musharraf defends deadly mosque raid

Pakistan's leader says those who had holed up in the compound had 'strayed from the correct path.' He pledges to defeat extremism and terrorism.
By Mubashir Zaidi and Laura King
Special to The Times

July 13, 2007

ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN — President Pervez Musharraf, in his first public comments since troops stormed a radical mosque in the heart of the capital, on Thursday defended the government's decision to use force and vowed to fight Islamic extremists "in every corner" of Pakistan.

Hours before Musharraf's nationally televised address, the mosque's leader, Abdul Aziz, offered a fiery funeral oration for his brother, a fellow cleric who was killed along with dozens of others in the two-day assault this week on the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, by elite commandos.

"God willing, Pakistan will soon have an Islamic revolution," said Aziz, who was escorted by police commandos to the funeral of his brother, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, in the family's ancestral village of Basti Abdullah in Punjab province.

"The blood of martyrs will bear fruit," declared Aziz, who was held days before the assault while trying to flee the mosque dressed in a burka, a head-to-toe covering worn by women.

The mosque raid and its aftermath have highlighted how deeply divided Pakistanis remain over the role of radical Islam in their society. People generally favored the mosque assault, launched after many calls for those inside to surrender, but at the same time, the Islamists' conservative views on many political and cultural issues are shared by a significant portion of the population.

In his address, however, Musharraf, who is also the military chief, denounced the Red Mosque leaders, saying they went against Islamic teachings.

"What do we as a nation want?" the president asked. "What kind of Islam do these people represent?"

"Terror and extremism have not ended in Pakistan," he said. "But it is our resolve to eliminate them…. Extremism and terrorism will be defeated in every corner of the country."

Pakistan was on high alert as Islamic militants vowed to exact vengeance for the mosque raid. In the latest of a string of deadly attacks in the region along the Afghan border, a suicide bomber Thursday killed two government officials in North Waziristan and a suicide car bomber killed three policemen in another tribal area.

In Islamabad, Pakistani officials took journalists on a tour of the ruined 2-acre mosque complex, providing a close look at the aftermath of more than 36 hours of fierce room-to-room combat that ended Wednesday. Walls were blackened and bullet-pocked; heaps of rubble still smoldered, and the ground was littered with spent ammunition and shattered glass.

Authorities were clearly eager to show the extent to which militants had turned the holy site into an armed fortress.

They displayed weapons caches — including machine guns, mines, makeshift firebombs and rocket-propelled grenades — and pointed out bunkers and snipers' nests set up throughout the maze-like complex. Militant loyalists staged at least two suicide bombings in the course of the assault, army spokesman Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad told reporters.

Even a full 24 hours after the confrontation's end, the number of deaths and the manner in which they occurred were being hotly disputed. The government put the death toll at 108 and said about two-thirds were killed during the two-day assault and the rest in the week leading up to it.

Leaders of hard-line religious parties put the toll far higher, saying at least 400 people were killed, but they were unable to substantiate their assertions.

The government said it knew of no women or children killed during the storming of the mosque, but it acknowledged that nearly 20 bodies found inside were so badly burned that their age or gender had not been determined. About 1,300 people, including dozens of women and children, fled the complex, which included two seminaries, one each for men and women, in the two days before the assault.

In the cases of many men and boys killed in the storming of the complex, it was difficult to determine whether they had joined the ranks of the militants or were being held against their will.

In the months leading up to the Red Mosque siege, the cleric brothers had orchestrated a vigilante campaign in the capital by students, many of them female, to root out prostitution and the sale of music and videos, which they regarded as vices.

In his speech, Musharraf pledged that religious institutions such as madrasas, or seminaries, would not be allowed to serve as breeding grounds for extremism.

"We will never allow any madrasa or mosque to be misused like the Red Mosque," he said.

Over the last five years, however, the Pakistani leader has been criticized at home and abroad for not living up to promises to reform the country's network of thousands of madrasas, apparently fearful of a backlash from religious hard-liners.

Musharraf also vowed Thursday to bolster security forces along the border with Afghanistan in coming months, saying they would be given heavy weapons, including tanks.

New reports this week by U.S. counter-terrorism officials said the threat from resurgent Al Qaeda and Taliban elements in the tribal borderlands was at its highest level since the period just before the Sept. 11 attacks, despite pledges from Musharraf to rein in militants taking sanctuary there.

Musharraf praised the security forces for showing restraint and courage in the mosque assault, in which 10 soldiers died.

In his speech, he said sending troops to battle compatriots had been a painful step.

"Unfortunately, we have been pitted against our own people," he said. "They had strayed from the correct path and become susceptible to terrorism."

--

king@latimes.com

Special correspondent Zaidi reported from Islamabad and Times staff writer King from Istanbul, Turkey. Special correspondent Zulfiqar Ali in Peshawar, Pakistan, contributed to this report.