Taking On the President; Knowing that they're running out of time, even longtime rivals in the opposition are uniting against Musharraf's regime.

Byline: Ron Moreau (With Zahid Hussain in Islamabad)

After nearly seven years in power, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is suddenly running into heavy political flak. His two main political rivals--former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, who are both in exile--have begun cooperating and are pledging to return in time to campaign for general elections scheduled for late next year. Several prominent Pakistanis, including retired Army generals and former Supreme Court chief justices, have written open letters to the president, who serves concurrently as Army chief of staff, asking him to retire from the armed forces and to hold free and fair elections next year under a caretaker government. Last week, 141 members of the formerly divided opposition in the National Assembly came together and presented a 500-page no-confidence motion against Musharraf's handpicked prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, detailing a litany of alleged misdeeds ranging from the shady privatizations of state companies to allowing well-connected monopolies to fix cement, energy and sugar prices at artificially high levels.

The government has a solid majority in the National Assembly and is expected to easily defeat the motion when it comes to a vote this week. But Aziz, and the president by extension, will take a serious political hit during the debate. Musharraf can be proud of Pakistan's 6 percent GDP growth over the past three years and of a 10 percent reduction in the number of Pakistanis living below the poverty line in the last five. But he and Aziz have failed to curb inflation that is running at about 9 percent. The resulting rise in prices for essentials such as sugar, wheat flour, rice and beans is squeezing most Pakistanis. "It's the first shot of the opposition's election campaign to win over public opinion," says Samina Ahmed, the South Asia director of the International Crisis Group. "It's going to have an impact."

The prospect of elections is galvanizing a formerly fractious opposition that includes Bhutto, Sharif, more than a dozen ...