Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, whose party was a big winner in Monday's vote, said he would meet with the other leaders of other parties to decide whether to impeach Musharraf when the next parliament convenes.
"He is completely finished. He has no option," but resigning, says retired Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, Pakistan's former army chief. "It will be very embarrassing for him to stay on with a hostile parliament."
The official tally from Monday's election has not been completed yet, but state television reported that Musharraf's supporters in the former ruling party had so far managed to win just 39 of 272 seats up for grabs in the National Assembly, the lower house of Pakistan's parliament.
Pakistan Television said that at least 87 seats had gone to the Pakistan Peoples Party of slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto; at least 66 went to the Pakistan Muslim League of Sharif, the man Musharraf overthrew in a 1999 coup. Musharraf wasn't up for re-election Monday, but he might as well have been: "The election was a vote of no-confidence in Musharraf," said Sen. Latif Khosa of the Peoples Party.
"The public said goodbye to Musharraf and his polices."
"This was (a) negative vote against Musharraf and his party and America," says Humayun Gauhar, an Islamabad publisher, political commentator and ghost writer of Musharraf's bestselling 2006 memoir. Gauhar figured that the opposition would be able to cobble together the two-thirds majority needed to impeach Musharraf if he didn't resign first.
The U.S. government has stood behind Musharraf since he reversed Pakistan's support for the fundamentalist Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. Gauhar and others say the next parliament will be less willing to support the U.S. war on terror.
Sharif has even said he's considered naming as president rogue nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan, seen as a hero in Pakistan for developing a nuclear bomb and in Washington as a villain for selling nuclear secrets to North Korea and other countries. Monday's contest — which Musharraf had called "the mother of all elections" — is supposed to nudge Pakistan toward full-fledged democracy, nearly nine years after former army chief Musharraf took power.
Without waiting for the final results, a rejuvenated opposition began planning to undo some of Musharraf's most controversial moves, including his Nov. 3 decision to purge the judiciary of independent judges. Sharif said the judges — including popular Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikar Muhammad Chaudhry — should be returned to their old jobs.
Many analysts expected that the Peoples Party and Sharif's Muslim League would attempt to form a coalition government. But the combination could be combustible; the two parties were arch-enemies in the '90s, each trading two terms as the ruling party. "The rank and file of both parties hate each other likes a cat hates a dog," Gauhar says.
Source: http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-02-19-musharraf-pakistan_N.htm?csp=34
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