A New Game.(Forming coalitions in Pakistan's parliament.)

President Pervez Musharraf thought he had the election all sewn up. His powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, assured him that Pakistan's Oct. 10 race would produce what he wanted: a friendly Parliament filled with "new faces." And he had no reason to doubt his spooks. His political operatives had already organized a pro-military breakaway faction of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League, called the PML-Q, as the president's political vehicle. Over the summer his advisers crafted a slew of laws and constitutional amendments that barred charismatic former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Sharif from the contest. And Musharraf's camp made one other pre-election gambit: it allowed the candidates of a coalition of six right-wing religious parties, called the United Action Council, or MMA in its Urdu-language acronym, to campaign freely on their virulently anti-American platform long before other parties entered the contest. The mullahs had won only two seats in the last Parliament, Musharraf's men reasoned, so they wouldn't be a threat this time either.

That last move was a mistake. Far from remaining a minor, fringe party, the mullahs of the MMA hit a chord with the Pakistani electorate by pushing an anti-American line and by being united for the first time, catapulting themselves from their pair of seats to 50. The election results were a bombshell that "shocked and upset" Musharraf, according to a senior Pakistani official. "He doesn't know what hit him," adds a Western diplomat in Islamabad. Musharraf claims to be uninterested in the newly elected politicians' maneuverings to form a new government. But behind the scenes he and his top aides are now working overtime on damage control.

The president's top lieutenants are already meeting secretly in safe houses with political leaders of the major parties, including the MMA, in an attempt to engineer a new government that Musharraf can live with. Above all, Musharraf would like to prevent the MMA and Bhutto's anti-military Pakistan People's Party from teaming up, leaving his PML- Q out in the cold. A senior Pakistani official says Musharraf and the military have concluded, "It's better to have the mullahs inside rather than outside the tent." Musharraf's cabinet recently approved a secret plan to foster a coalition government between the pro-Musharraf PML-Q, which won the most seats in the 342-member Parliament, and the MMA.

If they seal the deal, they'll certainly have a lot to disagree about. The mullahs want to send the small number of U.S. soldiers and FBI agents in Pakistan packing, as well as end the joint hunt for Taliban and Qaeda remnants. They wish to overturn the constitutional amendments that give Musharraf supremacy over Parliament and they reject his economic reforms, which they call "foreign dictated." In the lead-up to the elections, MMA candidates charged that the United States was dictating Pakistan's foreign- and domestic-security policy, calling Musharraf an American "stooge." More broadly, these fundamentalist politicians object to most of the cultural life of Musharraf's secular state.

Despite these differences, though, the mullahs may be Musharraf's best allies right now. A vociferous opposition comprising the outspoken mullahs and the PPP could devastate the new PML-Q government. If the PML-Q tries to lead by patching ...