Bangladesh News

The US’s second-ranking diplomat today signalled that the Bush administration was distancing itself from Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf after Opposition victories in last week’s elections.

Deputy secretary of state John Negroponte told senators that the US was supporting Pakistan’s people as they chose their leaders after the parliamentary elections. But he made scant mention of Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 coup, during his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Senior Bush administration officials, including Negroponte, have previously underlined their view that Musharraf has been “indispensable” to the US-led fight against extremists along Pakistan’s rugged border with Afghanistan.

Negroponte testified that “Pakistan has been indispensable” to that fight and said the US looks “forward to working with the leaders who emerge” from the formation of a new government.

When pressed by a lawmaker about whether the US would continue to back Musharraf, Negroponte acknowledged that “Musharraf is still the President of his country, and we look for to continuing to work with him.”

US lawmakers and Pakistani Opposition leaders have criticised the Bush administration for its steadfast support of the former army general despite his crackdown on the Opposition, judiciary and media. The Bush administration promoted Musharraf as a moderate leader able to hold together the nuclear-armed country.

But Musharraf has faced intense criticism since he declared a state of emergency in November and purged the supreme court before it could rule on the disputed legality of his re-election as President a month earlier.

Republican Senator Dick Lugar said the US should make it clear to Pakistan’s people that US interests “lay not in supporting a particular leader or party, but in democracy, pluralism, stability and the fight against violence.”

Negroponte said Pakistan’s recent elections were a “big step” towards civilian democracy and reflected the will of the voters, despite the deaths of more than 70 people on election day.

“The violence could have been worse,” Negroponte said. “The Pakistani people refused to be intimidated by a wave of murderous terrorist attacks prior to election day.”

Democratic Senator Joe Biden also urged the administration to move from “a policy focused on a personality, Musharraf, to one based on an entire country.”

Meanwhile, Makhdoom Amin Fahim, the PPP leader who is the front-runner to become Pakistan’s prime minister, may not bag the post as some sections of the party are lobbying for the slot to be given to a leader from Punjab.

There has been a “change in thinking” within the Pakistan People’s Party in the last two days and three other names are now doing the rounds in the party Shah Mehmud Qureshi, Yousuf Raza Gillani and Ahmed Mukhtar, who defeated PML-Q chief Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain with a huge margin in Gujrat, The News reported on Thursday.

Mukhtar said that during the past two days, there was some “change in thinking within the party ranks” regarding the province from which the PPP should nominate its prime minister. PPP sources had earlier said the post would go to Sindh, the impoverished southern province to which Fahim and slain party chairperson Benazir Bhutto belong.

Fahim, who met Zardari with his son Jameeluzzaman in Islamabad, has been given an “indirect message” to let his son become the chief minister of Sindh and, consequently, Fahim should not claim the slot of prime minister, the report said.

Four former ministers of Bhutto’s government Raza Rabbani, Nawab Yousuf Talpur, Naveed Qamar and Syed Khurshid Shah have also sent a message to PPP co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari to leave the decision to nominate the prime minister to the party’s central executive committee as such a move would keep the party united, the report said.