Democracy is bringing a change in Pakistan that will have far-reaching consequences not just for its people, but for the rest of the world. The forces of the mullah-military alliance have been dealt a decisive blow. However, while the focus thus far has been on the national elections and the drubbing President Pervez Musharraf's ruling party appears to have taken, a far more significant development - one that has implications for our troops in neighbouring Afghanistan - deserves our attention.
On the day Pakistanis went to the polls to elect a new parliament, they were also electing four provincial governments - and none was more important than the vast North-West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan, ruled by pro-Taliban Islamic fundamentalist parties since they swept to power in 2002.
Home to Pakistan's vibrant Pashtun minority, the NWFP provided safe haven to the Taliban and jihadi extremists of al-Qaeda for the past six years. While the Taliban quietly enlarged their areas of influence, the province's Islamist government provided the soft support by making life hell for religious minorities and working to eliminate women from the public domain.
The historic secular Pashtun nationalism that had celebrated peaceful civil disobedience since the 1920s was replaced by Saudi-inspired radical jihadi terrorism and suicide bombings. On Monday, however, the Pashtuns of Pakistan rose to the occasion and apparently defeated the provincial Islamist government and most of the mullahs who had been holding the area hostage.
The secular Awami National Party, led by Afsandyar Wali Khan, the grandson of the late legendary peace activist Bacha Khan (also known as the Frontier Gandhi) is now poised to form the next government in Peshawar. In one day, the people of Pakistan achieved through the ballot box what U.S. President George W. Bush's military might failed to accomplish in six years of fighting the Taliban.
Leading up to the elections, the jihadi extremists targeted the ANP and assassinated a number of their candidates. ANP activists - highly visible for wearing their red caps - became the Taliban's primary targets. There was a reason: The Islamists had managed to convince the Pashtun population that their historic national struggle was the same as the international jihad of Osama bin Laden. The ANP, however, stood in opposition to this jihadi ideology. Deeply religious and practising Muslims, ANP supporters have their roots in the kind of secularism where religion and state are kept apart and the use of Islam as a tool of politics is considered an insult to Islam itself.
In 2002, the Islamist gambit succeeded and the ANP was wiped out, unable to win a single seat. Six years later, it has come back with a roar, with a message to Osama bin Laden and his jihadi terrorists: Not in our name.
The ANP is most likely to form a coalition government with the late Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party; this will be welcomed by the people of the province, who have been held hostage for so long. The challenges to undo the damage done by Islamists will not be easy, but the Pashtuns are a patient people and among the most politically mature in Pakistan.
At the federal level, the PPP, with a plurality of the vote and the largest number of seats, has offered to form a coalition government with its rival, the Muslim League of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. These steps bode well for Pakistan and, as odd as it may sound, also for Canada. We have more than 2,000 troops next door in Afghanistan, and one of the PPP's promises is to ensure that Pakistani territory is not used as a haven for the Taliban and the jihadis. Perhaps this change in Pakistan will allow our troops to focus more on needed development and reconstruction than face the death traps laid by an elusive enemy that had its bases in Pakistan.
Tarek Fatah is author of Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, to be published in March.