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President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan "announced something of a plan--it was light on details" to end the martial law he imposed with his State of Emergency, reported CBS' Sheila MacVicar. Musharraf promised to hold January's parliamentary elections no later than mid-February and to become a civilian but with "no date for him to resign his military command." MacVicar called those two promises "not nearly enough to head that protest off" that had been called for Rawalpindi tomorrow by opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan's former prime minister.
Musharraf's pledge, on the other hand, "was welcomed by the White House," NBC's Richard Engel reported from Islamabad. Unidentified "US officials" told Engel that "they have privately told Bhutto not to hold the demonstration" and his sources inside the Musharraf junta informed him of plans to put Bhutto "temporarily under house arrest." For her part, Bhutto called for a massive turnout: "I have appealed to all the political parties to join us. I have appealed to the religious parties to walk side by side with us. I have appealed to the poor and the hungry to join us." Mused Engel, "a popular revolution is spreading."
On ABC, Martha Raddatz traveled north from Islamabad to the onetime tourist resort of the Swat Valley for an Exclusive: "If Pervez Musharraf has been cracking down on militants, it certainly is not evident here," she observed. The valley's population of 1.5m is now under the control of an Islamist militia. A local police precinct, for example, has been renamed Taliban Station. "This area is looking more and more like Afghanistan under Taliban rule," Raddatz remarked, showing the vandalized ruins of a girls' school. The takeover has created 200,000 refugees: "People are terrified here." Yet, far from a defeat for Musharraf's troops, the Swat Valley takeover could turn out to be his vindication: he "may soon mount a major operation here to show that his emergency decree is, indeed, intended to battle extremists."
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