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Pervez Musharraf fails to cut deal with Bhutto By Massoud Ansari in Islamabad and Gethin Chamberlain Sunday Telegraph, 2 September 2007 General Pervez Musharraf is facing the prospect of a two-pronged assault on his leadership of Pakistan as two of the country's most formidable political exiles prepared to return. One is Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister with whom the general has been trying to strike a deal. She emerged from talks in London to announce that she would be returning to Pakistan without having first reached such an agreement. Gen Musharraf had hoped to persuade Mrs Bhutto to seek office as prime minister while he kept the top job. Mrs Bhutto said she was returning to defeat the "forces of darkness". The failure of the talks present fresh difficulties for Gen Musharraf, who was already fighting a losing battle to prevent the return of another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, whom he forced from office in 1999. Under a deal brokered and guaranteed by the Saudi government, Mr Sharif was to go into exile until 2010. But last month Pakistan's supreme court ruled that the president had no right to prevent Mr Sharif returning, and he has announced his intention to do so on September 10 to wage a "decisive battle against dictatorship". He warned in London last week: "The president should understand that he is swimming against the tide of time." Success for Mr Sharif would alarm the United States, given his track record of aligning with Islamist parties sympathetic to the Taliban. Gen Musharraf is still trying to prevent his return and is thought to be pressing the Saudi government to rein him in. Pakistan's attorney general, Malik Qayyum, has said that Mr Sharif will be jailed if he comes home. The government will attempt to reimpose a life sentence given to him for attempting to prevent the landing of Gen Musharraf's aircraft at the beginning of the 1999 coup. Gen Musharraf and Mrs Bhutto have been wrangling for months over the terms of an agreement that would shore up his fraught re-election bid and allow her to return to Pakistan to contest parliamentary elections. The main stumbling block is her demand that he step down as head of the army and contest elections as a civilian. Mrs Bhutto set a deadline of last Friday to end the talks, but extended it for a few days after meeting the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. Without a deal, she still has corruption charges hanging over her. But yesterday she said she would announce the date of her return on September 14 and promised to work for a Pakistan free of the threat of Islamist terrorism. "We are at the crossroads of history," she said. "We have to make decisions which will determine whether extremism and terrorism can be contained in Pakistan to save it from internal collapse." • At least six people are believed to have died when a new road bridge in the southern city of Karachi, opened by Gen Musharraf last month, collapsed yesterday. Security forces later baton-charged a crowd which had thrown stones at them in anger at the slowness of rescue efforts.
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