WASHINGTON — The Bush administration was scrambling Tuesday to pick up the pieces of its shattered Pakistan policy after the trouncing that the party of President Bush's ally, President Pervez Musharraf, received in parliamentary elections.
The United States would still like to see Pakistan's opposition leaders find a way to work with Mr. Musharraf in some kind of power-sharing deal, administration officials said, but that notion appears increasingly unlikely given how poorly Mr. Musharraf's party did in the elections, against strong showings by the Pakistan Peoples Party of the late Benazir Bhutto and the party of Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister.
"Musharraf is obviously a poison pill," said Daniel Markey, a former South Asia expert at the State Department under President Bush. "He is fading out. The question is, what happens next?"
Senior officials from the State Department, the Pentagon and the White House were privately reaching out to Pakistan's victorious opposition parties, while trying hard "not to look like we're jumping on anybody's bandwagon," a senior Bush administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic rules.
The administration first tried to promote a power-sharing deal last summer, between Mr. Musharraf and Ms. Bhutto, but neither side proved amenable enough, and the deal collapsed after Mr. Musharraf imposed emergency rule, suspended the Constitution and dismissed the Supreme Court.
Despite those actions, and despite Ms. Bhutto's assassination in December, the Bush administration still has not given up on the idea that a democratically elected Parliament would share power with Mr. Musharraf.
Nor has administration officials given up hope that there would be some way to construct a coalition that will keep Mr. Musharraf in power as president.
"What we will urge is that those moderate forces within Pakistani politics who now have a seat at the table, so to speak, in winning seats in the Parliament, should band together, should work together for a few goals that are in the interest of Pakistan," said Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman. "We are going to continue our work with President Musharraf and whatever that new government may be on goals of our national interest."
President Bush has resisted calls within his administration and from Congressional critics to limit his dependence on Mr. Musharraf, given his decreasing popularity in Pakistan.
But administration officials say Mr. Musharraf remains the administration's preferred Pakistani leader, considering his record of cooperation with American-led counterterrorism operations. Until the day of the elections, administration officials were still hoping that Mr. Musharraf's party would eke out enough votes to allow the power-sharing plan to go forward.
Husain Haqqani, a former adviser to Ms. Bhutto and a professor at Boston University, said the United States must not make the mistake of continuing to put its relations with Mr. Musharraf ahead of the wishes of the Pakistani people, who have largely repudiated his political party at the polls.
In Pakistan's case, Mr. Haqqani said, Mr. Musharraf is doubly weakened because his election as president is disputed, having occurred during the state of emergency in which the news media was muzzled, the judiciary was curbed and thousands of opponents were jailed.
"Why is this man so important?" Mr. Haqqani asked.
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Delaware Democrat who was in Pakistan for the elections on Monday, issued a statement saying that the voting presented "an opportunity for us to move from a policy focused on a personality to one based on an entire people, to move from a Musharraf policy to a Pakistan policy."
Pakistan has never been more important for the United States than it is now, considering its internal instability and what American officials say has been a resurgence of operations by Al Qaeda from havens near the Afghan border. Bush administration officials have been trying to balance an insistence that Pakistan move toward democracy against Mr. Musharraf's warnings that more openness might lead to unrest that would allow Al Qaeda and the Taliban to operate more freely.
Administration officials said Tuesday that no matter who takes in charge in Pakistan, fighting terrorism should remain a top priority.
"At the end of the day, we hope that they continue to work with us as partners in counterterrorism," the White House spokeswoman Dana M. Perino told reporters aboard Air Force One during President Bush's trip to Africa. "The threat from extremists is just as grave and very immediate for the people of Pakistan."
American officials had hoped that a power-sharing agreement would relieve the growing pressure for Mr. Musharraf's ouster. Pakistani experts said that given the election results, that pressure is unlikely to ease.
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