Pakistan vote seen hurting Musharraf not war on terror

By Zeeshan Haider

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan's support for a campaign against al Qaeda and its cohorts is unlikely to be affected by U.S. ally President Pervez Musharraf's weakened position following his allies election defeat, analysts say.

Whoever rules in Islamabad, they say, the army under General Ashfaq Kayani's command will stay focused on the threat to Pakistan's stability posed by the Islamist militancy spreading out of tribal areas on the northwest border with Afghanistan.

"The election results may endanger Pervez Musharraf's rule, but I don't foresee any big change in the policy on the war on terror," said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a newspaper editor in Peshawar, the northwestern city that has been a prime target for bomb attacks over the past 18 months.

Voters didn't just vanquish Musharraf's allies.

They also dumped Islamist parties that accounted for 17 percent of seats in the last National Assembly and had held power in North West Frontier Province and shared it in Baluchistan, the other province abutting Afghanistan.

The party of assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto won most seats in the National Assembly, and is likely to form a coalition with other moderate forces.

One of its allies will almost certainly be the Awami National Party that trounced the political mullahs who'd held power in the NWFP capital Peshawar since 2002.

Most of the victorious independent candidates in the seven semi-autonomous ethnic Pashtun tribal lands, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, were affiliated to either Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) or the ANP.

"Pashtuns have sent a clear message to the world in these elections that they are not terrorists and extremists," Ghulam Ahmed Bilour, vice president of ANP told Reuters.

BAND OF MODERATES

He said ANP was negotiating to cobble together a coalition with "like-minded parties", including PPP, in the province.

Since the suicide attack that killed Bhutto after an election rally in the garrison town of Rawalpindi on December 27, more than 450 people have perished in the ongoing campaign of violence by the al Qaeda and Taliban groups fighting their asymmetrical war against the Pakistan state.

Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto's widower and de facto leader of PPP, said his wife had been martyred standing up against terrorism and there could be no relenting.

"It is war of terror against Pakistan and we have to fight it as our war," Zardari told a news conference late on Tuesday.

Bhutto was killed in a gun and bomb attack blamed on al Qaeda-linked militants at the end of an election rally in the city of Rawalpindi on December 27.