Pakistan

In what well could be a landmark decision, Pakistan's Supreme Court has overruled President Ghulam Ishaq Khan's dismissal of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and the National Assembly. Democracy and the rule of law have had a hard time in Pakistan's 45 years of independence. The judges of Pakistan's highest court have given them an important boost.Mr. Ishaq Khan and Mr. Sharif have been engaged in a power struggle centered on the president's constitutional power to fire the prime minister and dissolve the nation's elected parliament.

WASHINGTON - The United States has rewarded Pakistan yet again for its support of the U.S. war on terror with increased access to U.S. weapons and technology even though the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, admitted supplying nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya. The reward is the U.S. designation of Pakistan as a "major non-NATO ally," or MNNA. Pakistan thus joins an exclusive club that includes Australia, Japan, Egypt, Kuwait, South Korea, Argentina, New Zealand, Israel and the Philippines.

LAHORE, Pakistan - -An explosives-laden van rammed a steel gate outside buildings for Pakistan's top police and intelligence officials in the country's second-largest city Wednesday, killing 30 and injuring more than 250 people. It was one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in Pakistan this year. And it succeeded at again unsettling a nation that had begun to feel a renewed sense of confidence as Pakistani troops continued retaking parts of the country's northwest that had fallen into Taliban hands.

PHILADELPHIA -- The scenes were grisly. The U.S.-educated Benazir Bhutto, first female prime minister of Pakistan, newly returned from years in exile, was riding in a caravan through Karachi streets surrounded by tens of thousands of adoring supporters. Then came the explosions. Fire and body parts, most likely the work of al-Qaida, perhaps with aid from Taliban allies. Ms. Bhutto survived; more than 130 died. But the blasts were a wake-up call for her, Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf, and us. While Americans are focused on the Iraq war and a possible Iran war, the greatest danger to us lies within Pakistan.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Men armed with assault rifles battled for hours yesterday in a confrontation between pro- and anti-government forces that raged through residential neighborhoods in Karachi, the country's largest city, killing at least 28 people and injuring more than 100 others. The strife in the volatile port city of 15 million people, which has a long history of political violence, was the worst yet during a crisis that erupted two months ago when President Pervez Musharraf suspended the country's top judge.

NEW DELHI - The Arab-Israeli controversies that take center stage in the United States are off the front page in India. That's because Indians have their own festering sore that is a year older, has caused almost as many wars and in world terms is even more dangerous, because miscalculation could lead to a nuclear exchange. The open wound is the state of Jammu and Kashmir. It was ceded to India after the British partition of 1947 instead of to the Muslim state of Pakistan because the Hindu maharaja chose India -even though the majority of the population was, and is, Muslim.

When President Bush invited Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to Camp David on Tuesday and gave him the promise of $3 billion in military and economic aid over the next five years, many Pakistanis were pleased. But not all. The aid was widely seen as a reward to Musharraf for putting his country in the U.S. camp, which he accomplished by withdrawing Pakistan's support for the Taliban in Afghanistan and joining America's campaign against al-Qaida and its Taliban allies. Some Islamic parties in Pakistan are deeply angry with Musharraf for striking such an alliance with the United States.

PHILADELPHIA - Just as all signs point to Osama bin Laden as the mastermind behind the attack on our country, all signs point to Pakistan as the key to bringing him down. Pakistan is the key supporter of the Taliban, the primitive Muslim extremists who rule over remote Afghanistan. The Taliban shelter bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi businessman whose terror network aims to show the world that the United States is a spent power and to drive us out of the Middle East. Getting Pakistan to squeeze the Taliban into expelling bin Laden represents the best chance for our country to grab him without risky military action.

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration, struggling to find a way to keep Gen. Pervez Musharraf in power amid a deepening political crisis, is quietly prodding the Pakistani president to share authority with a longtime rival as a way of broadening his base, according to American and Pakistani officials. Musharraf, a key U.S. ally since the Sept. 11 attacks, has lost so much domestic support in recent months that the American officials have gotten behind the idea that an alliance with former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto would be his best chance of remaining president.