The elections that the United States dragooned Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf into holding last month have proved to be a disaster. Democracy was the big loser -- the winners were Islamic extremist parties who now have their strongest foothold in power ever in the world's only nuclear Muslim nation.
Indeed everything suggests that the stage is now set for a rebirth of the Taliban -- in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan.
Reports from the region Tuesday suggested that Fazul-ur-Rehman might become the next Pakistani prime minister. Rehman is the candidate of the Muttahidda Majlis-e-Amal -- an alliance of six politico-religious extremist parties -- which has enough seats to make it an indispensable partner in any coalition that can get a majority in Pakistan's fragmented legislature.
Rehman is a fiery antediluvian demagogue, friend of both Mullah Mohammed Omar, the former Taliban leader, and the world's most wanted terrorist, Osama Bin Laden.
Rehman's campaign appearances were festooned with "Osama Bin Laden the liberator" and "United States go home" posters and banners.
But he is the not the most notorious of the victors in the elections Musharraf was bustled into holding.
One of Pakistan's most notorious homegrown terrorists was also elected to parliament -- from prison. As Azam Tariq emerged from confinement a free man, he stepped into a limo and was driven away by his own armed guards.
His pro-Taliban, pro-al Qaida outlawed party is Sipah-e-Sahaba -- the Guardians of the Friends of the Prophet. It was one of five extremist groups banned by Musharraf last January as he tried to pacify U.S. concerns. The Pakistani police blame Tariq's Guardians, the country's most violent group, for some 400 killings in the last year alone.
The U.S. State Department praised the Pakistani elections as "an important milestone in the ongoing transition to democracy." One of the Bush administration's ranking national security officials confided privately, "better to have the crazies in than out of government."
But the reality is, that to call Pakistan an ally in the war against terrorism has become an oxymoron. Rehman and his cohort Sami ul-Haq were the tutors to most of Taliban's top leadership. Two years ago, Omar and bin Laden delivered joint commencement addresses at the University for the Education of Truth -- one of Pakistan's principal Islamic seminaries or madrasas -- in the township of Akora Khattak near the border city of Peshawar. Then, Pakistani and Afghan mujahedin or holy warriors came and went as they pleased across the porous frontier.
Now Taliban cadres are free again to come and go without fear of arrest. Because the Oct. 10 elections also gave control of the regional governments of two of Pakistan's four provinces -- Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan -- to those who guard the friends of the prophet. The entire length of the Pak-Afghan frontier is now once again the dominion of anti-American religious extremists.
From the provincial capitals of Peshawar and Quetta, they will run police forces, border guards and paramilitary scouts. Sharia law will be strictly enforced.
Everything appears to be in place for a rebirth of Taliban -- on both sides of the border. In Afghanistan, letters have been found tacked to trees urging an uprising against American "occupation" forces that have made "our Afghan sisters their servants and slaves." Several girls schools have been attacked, two by rocket-propelled grenades. Religious conservatives are still the law outside of Kabul.
Warlords use the sharia and opium and heroin smuggling to buy weapons and consolidate their hold. Opium production, banned by Taliban in 2000, was down to 185 tons last year. This year, opium is expected to yield 3,500 tons, on its way up to peak production of 5,000 tons in 1999. "Afghan brown sugar" is the country's only cash crop that doesn't require much water, a boon in a country that has suffered from drought for four consecutive years.
The Taliban's infamous Ministry for the Protection of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice still holds sway in distant provinces. In Kabul, Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah says the Karzai government is losing credibility because little of the $1.8 billion in emergency reconstruction aid pledged in Tokyo last January for 2002 by some 60 nations and 20 international organizations has made it into the country -- let alone the $4.5 billion through 2007.
The man who engineered the victory of Pakistan's fundamentalist parties was Hamid Gul, a retired former head of Pakistan's notorious Inter-Services Intelligence agency who acted as "strategic adviser" to MMA. Gul's reward: a Senate seat.
Some 300 ISI officers who had been working with Taliban prior to 9/11 and were transferred to regular army units have now been returned to the intelligence agency. NWFP and Baluchistan are once again privileged sanctuaries for al Qaida -- a clear and present danger for president Bush's war on terror.
The unholy nexus between Musharraf, the mullahs and the terrorists was clearly not the result the president had anticipated. But there is little doubt it was the key objective of Gul and his ISI cronies. The two-dozen arrests of al Qaida types in Pakistan were the result of FBI coordination with the Interior Ministry, not ISI.
ISI's role in supplying North Korea with nuclear know-how for its missile warheads in return for North Korean missile technology for Pakistan's nuclear delivery vehicles had been a closely guarded state secret. So when the New York Times broke the story, it was yet another awkward pause in the make-believe world of a Pakistan-U.S. alliance. The chief of the North Korean Air Force has been a frequent visitor to Islamabad since 9/11. He stays at the Marriott Hotel and doesn't even bother to conceal his identity; he wears his uniform.
By keeping Pakistan's two most prominent political leaders -- Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif -- out of the political contest and in exile abroad, Musharraf ensured major gains for the extremists -- from 5 percent to 20 percent; from two seats in the old parliament to 60 in the new -- as well as 116 seats for the "king's party," his own Pakistan Muslim League-Qaid-e-Azam, where retired army friends and ISI officers were recruited to run.
This pro-Musharraf spin-off of Sharif's PML scored the largest single gain of any party.
If the United States goes to war against Iraq, Pakistan may well go the way of Yugoslavia. It could easily blow into four deadly parts and where the country's nuclear arsenal would wind up is anyone's guess. Musharraf is not an Islamist, but a number of jealous, ambitious generals are. The president has survived six assassination plots. In the event of Musharraf's demise, ISI would play a major role in the struggle for succession.
