U.S. tries to quell crisis

KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) — Club-swinging police blocked the way out of Pakistan’s biggest city Thursday, scattering hundreds of demonstrators as the government sought to contain a protest movement that is emerging as a major challenge to its shaky one-year rule.

With anti-government activists vowing to press ahead, the U.S. stepped up efforts to mediate a solution to the crisis, which threatens to undermine its goal of getting nuclear-armed Pakistan to do more in fighting al-Qaida and Taliban militants along the border with Afghanistan.

Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, spoke by phone to President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, while U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson met with opposition leader Nawaz Sharif.

State Department spokesman Robert Wood said the U.S. envoys stressed that Washington wants to see “that violence be avoided and that any impediments to peaceful and democratic activities not be put in place.”

There were no signs of any breakthrough to calm political squabbling that is looking a lot like the unrest that preceded the removal of former military ruler Pervez Musharraf last year.

Activist lawyers are demanding Zardari fulfill a pledge to reinstate judges fired by Musharraf, a general who ousted Sharif as prime minister in a 1999 coup. But the protest movement heated up last month when the Supreme Court banned Sharif and his brother from elected office.

After the ruling, the federal government dismissed the Punjab provincial administration led by Sharif’s brother, stoking anger in Pakistan’s most populous region and putting the pair and their supporters on a collision course with Zardari.

The lawyers’ movement, Sharif’s party and other small political groupings called a “long march” to begin Thursday across the country, with groups of protesters planning to converge on the parliament building in Islamabad on Monday and begin a sit-in.

Government officials said they would allow protesters only to gather in a park close to the capital, vowing to keep them from massing outside parliament or in other downtown areas. Officials banned protests in much of the country Wednesday and detained more than 360 activists.

Also Thursday, a suspected U.S. missile strike killed seven people in northwestern Pakistan, killing seven unidentified people, a government official and a witness said.

A senior Kurram official said the house targeted was believed to be frequented by Islamist militants.