The next ten months may be the most difficult that President Musharraf has faced in his eight turbulent years running Pakistan.

If he needed any more persuasion that he needs to distance himself from religious and conservative parties now and crack down on the militants who lurk behind them, it came from yesterday’s bombs on the fledgeling India-Pakistan express train service. In his attempt to stay in power, as well to revive his quest for a modern Pakistan, he is contemplating the once unthinkable: doing a deal with Benazir Bhutto and her party to keep the fundamentalists at bay.

Yesterday’s attacks show how militancy threatens every flank of Pakistan: Kashmir, the wild Afghan border, and even this tiny thread of a train link, one of the few results of years of stop-start peace talks.

It is a sign that relations between the two nuclear-armed powers are in a comparatively benign phase that yesterday’s attacks provoked equal condemnation of the bombers. In times past, each would have blamed the other.

Both Musharraf and Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, have been good for stability. Musharraf, after some prodding by the US, has clamped down on militants crossing into India. He has the more difficult diplomacy, abroad and at home. India is broadly happy with the status quo, and for the “Line of Control” twisting its way through the northwestern Himalayas to calcify into a border. Many in Pakistan (and its army) would regard this outcome as intolerable.

Recent talks have sidestepped the worst issues of the border and the governance of India’s Kashmir province, and salvaged anything else on which the two agree. Hence the bus and train trips that issue forth from these tense summits as fragile symbols of goodwill.

India’s discovery of rapid economic growth has helped in giving Pakistan a lesson in the rewards of stability. So has militancy in Pakistan, reminding Musharraf that he panders to those causes at the risk of more violence. His alarm at militancy and at the rise of the religious parties appears to have jolted him into thinking that his best hope of saving his presidency and his reforms may be to turn to Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party. Talks have been going on for more than a month, in an excited although fitful way.

This is an astonishing direction for Musharraf; it is also, suddenly, almost his only option. He wants two things: to be assured of being reelected as President by Parliament; and to win support for his plans to modernise Pakistan’s education and social practices. The small religious parties and the mainstream, conservative Pakistan Muslim League have blocked his plans to reform the madrassas, or religious schools, one of the key requests of the US and Britain.

Musharraf’s first goal is tricky, given the challenges to his legitimacy. Since he took power in the 1999 coup, he has refused to stand down as head of the army while continuing as president.

Under the current constitution, the president is picked by Parliament. Musharraf could ask this Parliament simply to renominate him — but that would lack the appearance of legitimacy, and the suggestion has provoked derision. Or he could turn to the next Parliament, to be elected late this year — but he has no guarantee that it would pick him. He might try both: get nodded in again by this assembly, and ask for endorsement from the next — but that could still give him an embarrassing rebuff.

Enter Benazir, former prime minister, now living in exile from Pakistan where she faces corruption charges. She is head of one of the two mainstream political parties that is expected to do well in the elections. It embraces a secular, liberal agenda, and if it threw its support behind Musharraf his presidency and his agenda would be secure. It is hard to imagine his accepting her back as Prime Minister. Her nominee would be a less combustible formula, but even that may be too much for him to stomach. Violence and the looming elections have now given Musharraf a stark choice between the militants and the liberals. The US would like him to understand that he does not really have a choice at all.

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