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Pakistan's newly elected Government will seek to negotiate with Islamic militants and demilitarise the campaign against them to end the violence racking the country, leaders of the major coalition parties who will take power this week have said.
The explicit declaration of a desire to talk to extremists and to reduce the role of the Army marks a major change for the strategically crucial country and will confirm fears among American policymakers that the heavy defeat of President Pervez Musharraf at the elections will lead to Pakistan scaling back its support for the US-led "war on terror".
Pakistan's rugged western frontier is seen as a haven not just for Pakistani militants but also for al Qaeda and the Taleban and has been the site of fierce combat for several years.
This week a new Prime Minister and Cabinet is expected to be sworn in in Islamabad, after an accord between opposition parties. The party of assassinated former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto yesterday nominated former National Assembly speaker Yousaf Raza Gilani as its candidate for premier.
The unprecedented "grand coalition" he is likely to lead is expected to seek ways to permanently remove Musharraf, a loyal US ally who was re-elected President for a five-year term last year, from power.
"The Musharraf era and everything that was wrong with that era is now behind us," said one Pakistani parliamentarian yesterday. "We are not going to throw the baby out with the [bath] water, but a lot is going to be different."
American policymakers fear that any negotiations will both legitimise the militants in the eyes of the local population and give them time to re-arm, retrain and re-form. There has been a series of truces with extremist leaders in recent years, many arranged by Pakistani military commanders on the ground despite Washington's opposition.
"We do not believe that truces or talks with militants are productive," one US official in Islamabad told the Observer this year.
In interviews before the election last month, senior figures in both major coalition parties - Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League and Asif Ali Zardari's Pakistan People's party - said they favoured a less "military"
strategy to counter violence by Islamic extremists.
Sharif said he wanted a "wide-ranging debate" on how to fight violence, though he refused to commit himself to a policy. But the New York Times yesterday reported the Muslim League leader saying the militants were part of "our own people" and explaining that "when you have a problem in your own family, you don't kill ... you sit and talk".
Asif Ali Zardari, who assumed joint leadership of the PPP after Benazir Bhutto was killed, told the New York Times he favoured talks and a "beefed-up police force," saying "even a fool knows that ... what they have been doing for the past eight years has not been working".
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