That is far-fetched, according to experts here who argued that in the crisis sparked by President Pervez Musharraf's declaration of emergency rule, the United States should not be shunning Pakistani religious parties.

"It's very unlikely that the Islamists are going to swing to power in Islamabad and seize the nukes," said Joshua White, a scholar at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University.

"It is, however, likely that they will be influential on the margins of Pakistani politics," said White, who recently returned from a year in Pakistan's insurgency-torn North West Frontier Province.

He said the "vast, vast majority of Pakistanis you meet reject this kind of extremism, and I wish it was a message that got out a lot more."

On Tuesday, detained former premier Benazir Bhutto moved to forge an anti-Musharraf coalition including the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), an alliance of six Islamist parties.

MMA officials gave a positive gloss on Bhutto's initiative, as did her one-time rival Nawaz Sharif, raising the possibility of a unified opposition boycott of elections proposed by Musharraf for January 9.

The last time Pakistanis elected a parliament, in 2002, the MMA won about 11 percent of the vote. A pro-Musharraf group won the most seats in the ballot, which was effectively barred to the exiled Bhutto and Sharif.

The United States has called for "free and fair" elections this time round, insisting that Musharraf must first lift his state of emergency.

Where they have won power, such as in the northwest region, MMA members have proven "profoundly ordinary" as they get to grips with government rather than breathing fire in opposition, White said.

Musharraf meanwhile has angrily dismissed US fears that Pakistan's 50-odd nuclear weapons could fall into the wrong hands, as the Taliban and Al-Qaeda make inroads in areas bordering Afghanistan.

"When we think about the extremists, we're not talking about the political parties," Pakistan expert Marvin Weinbaum of Washington's Middle East Institute said at a SAIS seminar.

"And even when we talk about the extremists, many are heavily infiltrated by the security forces," he said, arguing that the MMA parties were as much threatened by still-more radical groups like the Taliban as mainstream forces.

"These parties have to be seen as part of the political firmament" and should not be "marginalized" by the United States, Weinbaum said.

Beyond the politicians, Pakistan's shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence, which is closely involved in the hunt for militants linked to Al-Qaeda, has long been viewed with suspicion for its past sponsorship of the Taliban.

And some scientists associated with the nuclear program are suspected of harboring extremist sentiments and could, it is feared, leak secrets to terrorists or anti-Western regimes such as Iran.

The reputation of Pakistan, the world's only known nuclear-armed Muslim country, has been tarnished by the sale of atomic secrets on a global black market headed by its disgraced chief nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, who wrote that the "barbarians are at the gates" last week, warned of the risks attached to Pakistan disintegrating into a failed state.

"The Taliban and its allies are gaining in strength and waiting to pick up the pieces from the civil war developing between the two most westernized, most modernizing elements of Pakistani society" -- the army and the middle-class elite, he wrote.

That is a fundamental misreading of the situation, according to White, who said that the Taliban's violence is hated even in insurgent hotbeds of Pakistan such as North and South Waziristan.

What does appeal to communities in the ill-developed, feudal region bordering Afghanistan is the prospect of clean government rooted in a religiously observant movement free of corruption, he said.

Christine Fair, senior political scientist at RAND Corp., noted that Pakistan is not alone in seeing a revival of religiously inspired political thinking.

Some 60 percent of US evangelicals favor a Biblical interpretation of American law, she cited polls as suggesting.

Such hardline Protestants were no more likely to erect "Christian Sharia in an American Jesus-stan" than Islamic extremists are to swamp Pakistan's federal government, she said.

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