ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistan's ruling party conceded defeat Tuesday after opposition parties routed allies of President Pervez Musharraf in parliamentary elections that could threaten the rule of America's close ally in the war on terror.

Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, head of the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, told AP Television News that "we accept the results with an open heart" and "will sit on opposition benches" in the new parliament."

"All the King's men, gone!" proclaimed a banner headline in the Daily Times. "Heavyweights knocked out," read the Dawn newspaper.

The results cast doubt on the political future of Musharraf, who was re-elected to a five year term last October in a controversial parliamentary ballot.

With the support of smaller groups and independent candidates, the opposition could gain the two-thirds majority in parliament needed to impeach Musharraf, who has angered many Pakistanis by allying the country with Washington in 2001 to fight al-Qaida and the Taliban after the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

Final results were not expected before Tuesday evening, but the election's outcome appeared to be a stinging public verdict on Musharraf's rule after his popularity plummeted following his decisions late last year to impose emergency rule, purge the judiciary, jail political opponents and curtail press freedoms.

The private Geo TV network said the party of slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and another group led by ex-premier Nawaz Sharif had so far won 149 seats, more than half of the 272-seat National Assembly.

The pro-Musharraf Pakistan Muslim League-Q party was a distant third with 33 seats. A ream of party stalwarts and former Cabinet ministers lost in their constituencies.

Musharraf has promised to work with whatever government emerges from the election. But the former general is hugely unpopular among the public and opposition parties that have been catapulted into power are likely to find little reason to work with him — particularly since he no longer controls the powerful army.

Sharif has been especially outspoken in demanding that Musharraf be removed and that the Supreme Court justices whom the president sacked late last year be returned to their posts. Those judges were fired as they prepared to rule on whether Musharraf's re-election last October was constitutional.

If the opposition falls short of enough votes to remove Musharraf, the new government could reinstate the Supreme Court justices and ask them to declare the October election invalid.

The spokesman for Sharif's party, Sadiq ul-Farooq, told reporters Tuesday that Musharraf "should go." But he added that if the restored justices validate Musharraf's October election to a new term, the opposition would accept the decision.

"We want to put Pakistan back on the track of democracy, constitution and rule of law, and the restoration of sacked judges is a must to achieve this goal," he said.

Musharraf, at best, faces the prospect of remaining in power with sharply diminished powers and facing a public hostile to him. Last year he stepped down as army chief, and his successor has pledged to remove the military from politics.

The PML-Q said it accepted the results, but Pervaiz Elahi, the party's president, noted that the party had stood by Musharraf for five years.

"We respect him, and we are still with him," Elahi, the outgoing chief minister of Punjab province, told Geo TV on Tuesday.

The results could have far-reaching implications for the U.S.-led war on terror, especially Pakistani military operations against al-Qaida and Taliban-style militants in border areas of the northwest. Sharif and others have called for dialogue with the extremists and have criticized military operations in the area because of their impact on civilians.

Afrasiab Khattak, a leading opposition politician from the northwest, said his Awami National Party did not believe "that a military solution will work," adding his group "will never support American forces coming here and operating."

In Karachi, the Pakistani stock market rose 2.15 percent to 14,669.87 points and the rupee gained against the U.S. dollar. Traders said the market was reacting positively because the election was generally peaceful.

Although fear and apathy kept millions of voters at home Monday, the elections for national and provincial assemblies were a major step toward democracy in Pakistan, which has been under military rule for the past eight years under Musharraf and for over half of its 60-year history.

But a win by the opposition is likely to restore the public's faith in the political process and quell fears that the results would be rigged in favor of the pro-Musharraf forces.

Islamic militant violence scarred the campaign, most notably the Dec. 27 assassination of charismatic opposition leader Bhutto, but polling day was spared such an attack. The government, however, confirmed 24 election-related deaths in clashes between political parties.

Geo TV said unofficial tallies from 229 of the 268 National Assembly seats being contested showed Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party with 33 percent and Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-N party with 27 percent. The pro-Musharraf PML-Q was third with 14 percent.

The Election Commission had results for 124 seats, with Sharif's party holding 30 percent, Bhutto's party 27 percent and the PML-Q 12 percent.

Several close political allies of Musharraf were election casualties. The chairman of the ruling party, the foreign minister and railways minister were among those who lost seats in Punjab, the most populous province and a key electoral battleground.

Religious parties also fared badly, and were set to lose their control of the North West Frontier province gained in the last parliamentary elections in 2002, when they benefited from Pakistani anger over the U.S.-led invasion to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan.

well, he's not out yet...

Yeah, this is to elect the legislative body, not the executive head.

He'll probably be pressured to step down and maybe even impeached, but there is still time for Musharraf to throw the election results out, declare marshal law and place all new members of parliament under house arrest.

I have two major problems with that report. First, why bury the lede at the very last paragraph. The fact the religious parties lost in NWFP is huge, and this article treats it as an afterthought. It also reads as if those 2002 elections weren't as fraudulent as my nine inch cock. Everyone knew Musharraf's party would lose if the election wasn't a total sham. It's barely even worth mentioning that Musharraf isn't popular enough to win a decent amount of support. It is, however, huge news that the religious parties tanked in the most religious region in Pakistan. This shows just how wrong the pro-Musharraf crowd has been since he took power, and especially since 9/11 in thinking that democracy in Pakistan would harm the United States. If anything, maybe free and fair elections in 2000 or 2002 or 2004 would have prevented al-Qaeda and the Taliban from making themselves at home in NWFP as Musharraf twiddled his thumbs.


And this implies that the reason Musharraf was unpopular is because he supported the US in the War on Terror. For one thing, his support was more rhetorical than substantive, but more importantly, it just isn't true. Sure, Pakistanis don't like the US a whole lot, and with really good reasons. The reason they dislike the US is the same reason they hate Musharraf--support for autocracy. The US and Musharraf have played a cynical game in Pakistan--Musharraf since the late 90s and the US since Pakistan became separate from India. It is irresponsible or ill-informed journalism to suggest Pakistanis were angry with Musharraf simply because he allied himself with the US in the War on Terror.

I personally took it to mean:

1) A message that stated that Pakistan's primary reason for voting him out was because they hate the U.S. (as you took it);

but with more subtlety,

2) A slipped-in reminder that the right supported a dictator.

The problem is, assuming this is what the article was saying, both the facts are slices of truth. The US supported Musharraf in the late 90s under a Democratic president as well, so it hasn't been a Dem/Rep type of thing. Here's a propaganda piece about Clinton from Musharraf in 2006:

http://www.presidentofpakistan.gov.pk/P ... 6&nMonth=2

Moreover, it isn't like, say, Hillary Clinton has been any tougher on Musharraf in the past. Remember last year when Obama made his foreign policy speech and said he would send US troops into Pakistan if Musharraf was "unable or unwilling" on actionable intelligence? hil and the rest of the pussy Dems ripped him for it and used similarly misleading language to what John McCain is now using: that, somehow, Obama said he'd bomb an "ally." This is a very important issue for me, and it was the proverbial tipping point in my support for Obama. Here are his comments that caused the controversy:


This is supposed to be the guy short on substance, by the way. At the time, Hillary and her ilk refused to answer what they would do in Pakistan based on the questions being "hypothetical."

What does this have to do with the article. Well, being that I think every word of Obama's speech is spot on accurate, the last paragraph is pertinent. And that is because Pakistanis hate for America is easily explained by the type of support the US has given Pakistan in the past and the types of leaders it has supported. Most infamously it was General Zia in the 80s, who radicalized many Pakistanis through a government sponsored Islamization program. Next, Musharraf, but in between the US aid to Pakistan was basically all military, which, combined with Zia's policies, made Pakistan's education system overly dependent on madrasas, and further entrenched the military as the true rulers of Pakistan, even in the always short democratic interludes between despots. This only got worse after 9/11, but it isn't like Clinton represented a sea change in US policy toward Pakistan.

What is most instructive, though, and not mentioned in the piece, is that there was a period in 2006 where the US was quite popular in Pakistan, when immediately following the terrible earthquake that killed shitloads of people the US gave huge amounts of aid to help out. Pakistanis genuinely appreciated it, and I think it was a missed opening in relations with Pakistan's people, because after it was over the Bush Administration went right back to valuing its relationship with Musharraf over its relationship with the Pakistani people.

This idea that Musharraf lost because of his support for the US is just self-referential nonsense. He lost because he was an autocratic, oppressive piece of shit. Stories reporting on this election should focus on the question of what the hell kind of bullshit explanation George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and the rest of the foreign policy establishment's stale minds had for supporting him in the first place. You say there's subtlety in the article along these lines, and I concede that is possible, but subtlety is hardly enough. This is the type of sanitized foreign policy reports Americans read all the time, which might be a reason we know shit about the rest of the world.

Sorry, this is way too long.