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Islamabad: Opponents of President Pervez Musharraf are wooing Islamist politicians to bolster their drive to curb the power of the US allied leader in the wake of his party's defeat in recent elections.
The negotiations highlight the extent of Musharraf's political isolation following the February 18 vote that was widely seen as a repudiation of the former general's increasingly authoritarian eight-year rule.
"We believe that the problems are so big that as far as possible we should take along all the political forces," Farhatullah Babar, the spokesman of slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto's party, said on Friday.
Bhutto's widower and political successor, Asif Ali Zardari, warmly embraced Fazlur Rehman, the bearded leader of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, an alliance of Islamist parties, when they met in the capital, Islamabad, late on Thursday.
MMA spokesman Abdul Jalil Jan said the alliance wanted commitments on "Islamisation" from a new coalition government. He did not detail the commitments. Babar said the two sides would meet again to discuss including the MMA in a broad "government of national consensus". Jan said MMA lawmakers would vote to strip Musharraf of the right to dissolve parliament and for the abolition of the National Security Council, a body that Musharraf established after his 1999 coup to give the army a formal say in the running of the country.
"We will support them on these issues even if we don't join the government," Jan said.
Extremism
Both the MMA and the main pro-Musharraf group were thrashed in the elections. Voters turned to the moderate parties of Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, raising hopes in the West of a firm push against Islamist extremism.
Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party, which had vowed to root out extremism before she was killed in a gun and suicide-bomb attack on December 27, seems to have little in common with the Islamists beyond a wish to tame Musharraf.
Musharraf was re-elected president in October by a parliament packed with his supporters. Opponents are calling loudly for the former military strongman to resign, saying he has trampled on democracy, the judiciary and the media since taking power in a 1999 coup against Sharif.
But Musharraf retains some US support for his record in combating the Taliban and Al Qaida along the border with Afghanistan and has shown no willingness to step down, raising the prospect of a showdown with the new government.
The Pakistan Peoples Party won 87 seats in the recent elections. Together with Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-N party and other allies, the prospective coalition partners have 171 of the 272 seats in the National Assembly.
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