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Once the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) won the Feb. 18 general elections and set aside their rivalry to work towards forming a coalition government, it became clear that President Pervez Musharraf's days in power were numbered. His extraordinary run began when he seized power in 1999 in a military coup, and has endured by convincing the Bush administration of his indispensability in the U.S.-led 'war-on-terror' in neighbouring Afghanistan and in preventing Pakistan's nuclear arsenal from falling into the hands of extremists. At home, he manipulated the constitution to 'legitimise' his grip on power. But he has earned many enemies. The most formidable turned out to be Pakistan's powerful legal fraternity, which rallied around the chief justice and 63 members of the judiciary after Musharraf sacked them for refusing to endorse his Nov. 3, 2007 state of emergency. With the PPP and the PML-N now vowing to reinstate the judges the law seems to be catching up to Musharraf.
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