Pakistan ? A top ruling party official on Saturday gave Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf a two-day deadline to quit or face impeachment proceedings.

Musharraf’s allies insisted he was not stepping down and was prepared to fight impeachment charges.

But pressure on the president mounted further after the ruling party drew up a draft of charges to support a potential impeachment.

“Musharraf is running out of time,” Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told reporters. “If he fails to decide to quit within the next two days, the impeachment process will take its course.”

Qureshi is a member of the Pakistan People’s Party, the dominant group in the ruling coalition that announced its intentions last week to impeach Musharraf.

The building momentum to throw the president out of office has injected even more uncertainty into an already volatile situation in Pakistan, a country whose stability the United States considers critical to success in the war on terror.