Pakistan

Pakistan — A suicide attack on a hospital in northern Pakistan left 25 dead and 40 wounded Tuesday – and offered a sobering reminder of the challenges facing an untested democratic government now that key U.S. ally Pervez Musharraf has resigned as president. Musharraf, the former army chief who had dominated Pakistani politics since taking power in a 1999 coup, stepped down Monday under pressure from an elected parliament that had drawn up an impeachment case against him. The White House viewed Musharraf as a loyal ally in the war on global terrorism. But his exit was cheered by most Pakistanis: A Gallup Pakistan poll of 500 urban Pakistanis, taken after his farewell speech Monday, found that 63% welcomed his resignation and 55% expect things to improve for Pakistan now that he's gone. Meanwhile, the violence gets worse inside Pakistan itself. The attack Tuesday on a hospital in the northwestern city Dera Ismail Khan may be a wakeup call. After assassinating a local Shiite Muslim leader, Sunni extremists dispatched a suicide bomber to kill his grieving family members when they gathered at the emergency room of the local hospital.

The decision of Pervez Musharraf to resign as President removes from Pakistan’s political stage the leader who for nearly nine years served as one of the United States’ most important — and ultimately unreliable — allies. And it now leaves American officials to deal with a new, elected coalition that has so far proved itself to be unwilling or unable to confront an expanding Taliban insurgency determined to topple the government. The question of who will succeed Mr. Musharraf is certain to unleash intense wrangling between the rival political parties that form the governing coalition and to add a new layer of turbulence to an already unstable nuclear-armed nation of 165 million people.