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If there is a winner so far from last month's parliamentary elections in Pakistan, it's Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the portly, bearded and turbaned cleric who champions Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar. He and his alliance of six right-wing religious parties, the United Action Council, or MMA in its Urdu-language acronym, captured 60 seats in the election, making them a potent force in the negotiations to form a new government. Rahman is now one of the most important men in Pakistani politics.
Both President Pervez Musharraf's pro-military Pakistan Muslim League-Q and Benazir Bhutto's pro-democracy Pakistan People's Party have been courting Rahman with a passion. Neither party agrees with the mullahs' fundamentalist agenda. But neither did they win enough seats to form a government without a coalition. "With both the PML-Q and the PPP wanting to partner with the MMA as a means of leveraging themselves into power," says a senior Pakistani official, "Rahman's and the mullahs' importance has been elevated far beyond their party's electoral significance."
There is, of course, a loser, too: Pakistani democracy. Musharraf promised to transfer some of his absolute power to the new government, but a month after the elections, politicians have still failed to build a coalition he finds acceptable. The logjam is so tight that last week Musharraf delayed the first session of the new Parliament for at least a week. But as long as Rahman and the MMA are seen as kingmakers, there may be no way out of the impasse.
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It didn't begin that way. The day after the elections Musharraf dispatched his men to see if they could cut a deal with the PPP. Meeting with the leader of the PPP's parliamentary delegation, Makhdoom Amin Fahim, Musharraf's messengers said he would accept Fahim as prime minister if the PPP did not question the president's new five-year presidential term and his sweeping constitutional powers. And there was a sweetener for Bhutto: as prime minister, Fahim could free her husband, Asif Zardari, who has been imprisoned for six years on corruption allegations, as well as close the corruption cases against her. But Bhutto balked when Fahim relayed the terms to her in London on Oct. 12. She told Fahim that she didn't like the idea of his being prime minister as long as she remained in exile. What's more, Bhutto demanded that it be Musharraf who freed her husband and dropped the charges against her. The proposed deal was a dead letter.
Musharraf then turned to the mullahs. But in the meantime the pumped-up MMA had already nominated Rahman as its non-negotiable prime ministerial candidate. Musharraf and his party preferred the colorless and pliable Baluchistan tribal leader Zafarullah Jamali. As the two sides talked, Bhutto struck back. She ordered Fahim to offer Rahman a deal he couldn't refuse: the prime ministry in a PPP-MMA coalition government. "Benazir really threw a spanner into the works by telling Rahman he could be prime minister," says the senior Pakistani official. "He bolted from talks with the PML-Q immediately." The announcement last week that the MMA and PPP had the numbers to form a new government sent shivers through Musharraf's camp and likely contributed to his decision to postpone the opening of Parliament.
But the PPP's official call to Rahman crowning him prime minister never came. Keeping the mullahs on ice, the PPP went back to the table with Musharraf. The talks, though, were most likely posturing. "On the surface it may have seemed that the PML-Q was moving in the PPP's direction, but in its heart of hearts it had no intention of forging an alliance with them," says the senior Pakistani official. Musharraf may have been spotlighting Bhutto's double-dealing to the MMA--and showing the mullahs that they aren't indispensable.
Musharraf's camp still favors striking a deal with the Islamists. But the question remains: will Rahman be willing to settle for far less than prime minister? Most Pakistani analysts believe the MMA will climb down. But it'll come at a price. According to the senior Pakistani official, the mullahs may compromise by allowing the president to remain as a uniformed leader, if he agrees to drop the military-dominated National Security Council, which, under new constitutional amendments, has the power to dissolve Parliament. Such a compromise would provide a fig leaf of sorts, allowing the mullahs to join a PML-Q-dominated government without winning any major cabinet positions.
The Pakistani people will probably be left with the worst deal of all. Since January, Musharraf has trumpeted his vision of a new Pakistan headed by a modern, dynamic leader. But in the most likely scenario--a PML-Q and MMA coalition--the choice of prime minister will be between a conservative Baluch tribal leader and a fundamentalist cleric. "It's quite extraordinary that these two figures represent the opposite of what Musharraf has envisioned," says the senior Pakistani official. But any leader might be better than the empty promise of one to come.
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