From Amir Taheri: Pakistan Votes — Terror Loses.

SOME of the world’s deadliest terrorists vowed to prevent it; powerful military figures plotted to rig its outcome. Yet Pakistan’s election went off with minimum violence, producing results whose legitimacy no one can contest.

The biggest winner is the Pakistani people - who, given the chance, manifested their attachment to pluralism and the rule of law. By turning up in millions to vote, they confounded both the terrorists and the shadowy security agencies.

Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies did all they could to disrupt things, killing some 300 candidates, election officers and party activists. Their sinister slogan “From Box to Box” - i.e., anyone who cast a vote into the ballot box could end up in a coffin - was posted or scribbled on many walls. The terrorists also destroyed at least 12 polling stations and stole several dozen ballot boxes.

Still, they failed. And their political allies did no better.

The Unified Assembly for Action (MMA), a coalition of Islamists, saw its share of the vote drop from almost 11 percent in the last general election five years ago to around 3 percent. It lost control of the only one of Pakistan’s four provinces that it governed, and all its main leaders lost their seats. In the provincial assembly of Sindh, the MMA won no seats.

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The message of this election is clear: The overwhelming majority of Pakistanis reject both military rule and its political twin of Islamism.

President Bush calls it a victory in the war on terror, which in real English is the war on Islamic jihadists, and that it clearly is. The New York Sun describes it as a success for the Bush Doctrine.

So when President Bush talks of the universality of the human desire for freedom, it turns out to include the people of Pakistan. So the victory by civilian political parties in Monday’s vote in Pakistan opens a new chapter in the march of democracy. The balance among civil society, religious authorities, and the army has been unraveling for more than a year. Monday’s decisive vote will give the two largest political parties an overwhelming majority of seats in the Congress and raises the possibility of impeachment proceedings against President Musharraf.

The civilian parties also swept the field in provincial elections where the most important development came in the North-West Frontier Province along the mountainous region along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. That is the area in which Al Qaeda and the Taliban have regrouped and from which they launch attacks against forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the democratic government in Afghanistan. In 2002, a coalition of hard-line religious parties, the MMA, took power. Now the voters in the area have thrown the MMA out, putting in its place a secular Pashtun alignment, the Awami National Party.

The marginalization of the MMA, at a time of mounting tensions, is the Pakistani version of the Anbar province experience in Iraq: the Pakistani Pashtun, like Sunni Arab tribes, have chosen sides against the terrorists and with democratic forces. The MMA’s sharply reduced vote in its heartland was a bellwether; the alliance was almost swept off the field, winning only a handful of seats in the new Congress.

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