Romancing the Mullah.(Maulana Fazlur Rahman)

If there is a winner so far from last month's parliamentary elections in Pakistan, it's Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the portly, bearded and turbaned cleric who champions Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar. He and his alliance of six right-wing religious parties, the United Action Council, or MMA in its Urdu-language acronym, captured 60 seats in the election, making them a potent force in the negotiations to form a new government. Rahman is now one of the most important men in Pakistani politics.

Both President Pervez Musharraf's pro-military Pakistan Muslim League-Q and Benazir Bhutto's pro-democracy Pakistan People's Party have been courting Rahman with a passion. Neither party agrees with the mullahs' fundamentalist agenda. But neither did they win enough seats to form a government without a coalition. "With both the PML-Q and the PPP wanting to partner with the MMA as a means of leveraging themselves into power," says a senior Pakistani official, "Rahman's and the mullahs' importance has been elevated far beyond their party's electoral significance."

There is, of course, a loser, too: Pakistani democracy. Musharraf promised to transfer some of his absolute power to the new government, but a month after the elections, politicians have still failed to build a coalition he finds acceptable. The logjam is so tight that last week Musharraf delayed the first session of the new Parliament for at least a week. But as long as Rahman and the MMA are seen as kingmakers, there may be no way out of the impasse.

It didn't begin that way. The day after the elections Musharraf dispatched his men to see if they could cut a deal with the PPP. Meeting with the leader of the PPP's parliamentary delegation, Makhdoom Amin Fahim, Musharraf's messengers said he would accept Fahim as prime minister if the PPP did not question the president's new five-year presidential term and his sweeping constitutional powers. And there was a sweetener for Bhutto: as prime minister, Fahim could free her husband, Asif Zardari, who has been imprisoned for six years on corruption allegations, as well as close the corruption cases against her. But Bhutto balked when Fahim relayed the terms to her in London on Oct. 12. She told Fahim that she didn't like the idea of his being prime minister as long as she remained in exile. What's more, Bhutto demanded that it be Musharraf who freed her husband and dropped the charges against her. The proposed deal was a dead letter.

Musharraf then turned to the mullahs. But in the meantime the pumped-up MMA had already nominated ...