Expect no surprises in Pakistan's "democratic" election
No matter what the numbers are on voting day, the usual suspects will declare themselves the winners
Feb 4, 2024 — Pakistan, a nuclear-armed, poverty-riven, economic basket case controlled by a duplicitous Army which has become the most powerful institution in the land — its generals anointing civilian leaders while accumulating vast wealth for themselves and the military at large — is heading into an election scheduled for the 8th of February fighting for its survival.
Having undermined the U.S.-led democratic experiment in next-door Afghanistan by helping the Taliban to take power there two-and-a-half years ago, Pakistan’s Army has also sabotaged democratic rights at home. In doing so, it has led the country to the brink of political, financial and social collapse.
It sounds like the same old story, a downward spiral of corruption, poverty and unrest that elicits a weary eye-roll from the plus-ca-change brigade of geopolitical analysis used to hearing that Pakistan is “the most dangerous country in the world”.
This time, however, it is different for a key reason that ensures Pakistan maintains its status — repeated often by U.S. political and military leaders, most recently in late 2022 by President Joe Biden — as a serious threat to regional and global security. The Taliban terrorists that the Army thought it could manipulate to boost its power and ambitions at home and abroad are now biting the hand that fed them.
In mid-January, Pakistan traded air strikes across the south-western border with Iran, amid mutual accusations that each side is harbouring terrorists preparing to attack the other. But poor, marginalised Baloch separatists are a minor headache for the Pakistani government compared to the existential threat from the Taliban in the north-western mountain passes, just a day’s drive from the capital Islamabad.
The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, are fanatical brethren in the broad Al Qaeda project to unify Islamist anti-state groups in the violent jihad central to Osama bin Laden’s domino theory for the creation of a global caliphate headquartered in Afghanistan.
The Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan, supported by Pakistan’s military spy wing, the Inter Services Intelligence agency, to create a buffer state that would thwart India’s ambition for regional dominance, won kudos, congratulations and admiration from fellow-travellers worldwide, including Hamas, now fighting for the destruction of Israel, Pakistan’s then-Prime Minister Imran Khan, and Al Qaeda, the Big Daddy of them all.
They’ve become the inspiration for jihadists everywhere, as proof that the drip-drip-drip of patient terror exhausts the backers of governments in Islamic states, such as the United States in Afghanistan, and France which recently withdrew troops from Niger where they had supported the fight against Islamism in the Sahel, said Hans-Jakob Schindler, director of the New York- and Berlin-based Counter Extremist Project.
“I would say this is exactly what happened in August, 2021, to the dot, exactly what Osama bin Laden predicted we would do, that if he just put enough terrorism pressure on us, we’d simply get tired,” Schindler said, referring to the United States and its NATO partners who quit Afghanistan after 20 years of gruelling warfare.
“We hadn’t lost militarily, we were just physically, militarily, and definitely politically tired with this war, and left,” he said. “In the eyes of the global Islamist community, this is the narrative coming true. From their perspective they are winning. We are in a situation where, from an Islamist perspective, the last three years have been the most glorious ever.”
Hillary Clinton, as Washington’s top diplomat, in 2011 warned Pakistan’s leaders they’d be crazy to think they could keep the “snakes,” as she called their apparently tame Talibs, in their own backyard and “expect them only to bite your neighbors”.
Clinton’s prediction and bin Laden’s dream are converging in real time. It’s an existential threat largely being ignored, not just by the outside world, but also by the noblesse oblige of Pakistan’s governing elite, who are blithely behaving as they usually do, fighting like cats in a bag as the country crumbles beneath them.
Afrasiab Khattak, a former lawmaker and now a political analyst, said the long-delayed election is unlikely to change this worrying landscape. Democracy cannot exist in a country where political power is in the gift of the generals. He blames Imran Khan, the wildly popular former cricket star who won a “heavily rigged” vote in 2018, and as prime minister “was just the political face of military rule”.
“Power went to Khan’s head,” and rifts with his benefactors led to a parliamentary no-confidence vote that ended his premiership in April, 2022. He was replaced by Shebaz Sharif, who, Khattak said, handed over to the generals what power Khan hadn’t already given them, “practically shifting the power of the state to (the Army’s) General Headquarters”.
While the military and their political puppets appear to think the election will keep up the pretence that Pakistan is a democracy, few observers believe the conclusion is anything but foregone.
The odds for next prime minister are on Nawaz Sharif, brother of Shebaz, who returned to Islamabad from London in October. He’d been there for three years, effectively a fugitive after leaving, ostensibly for medical treatment, and then failing to return to face a jail term after being convicted on corruption charges connected to the 2016 Panama Papers controversy. (His family was linked to property purchases in London made through companies in the tax-haven British Virgin Islands.)
It’s the way things play in Pakistan’s political circus. Prime ministers accuse their predecessors of corruption and throw them in jail. Nawaz Sharif was imprisoned by Imran Khan, who was then himself thrown in jail by Nawaz’s brother, Shebaz who replaced him as PM. Shebaz Sharif stepped aside last year to allow a caretaker administration to prepare for the election.
The preparations have included dropping those old charges against Nawaz Sharif, to enable him to stand for election, and convicting Khan on graft charges, to make sure he cannot run.
Independent Pakistani journalist Asad Ali Toor described the “complete dismantling” of Khan’s party, the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (or PTI, which stands for Movement for Justice), which is the most popular in the country.
At 71 years old, Khan is handsome, charismatic, energetic, has a huge presence on social media, and commands admiration in the cricket-mad country as the captain of the national team that won the country’s first, and so far only, World Cup in 1992.
Yet his three years in power were a disaster. He failed to tackle record inflation and unemployment that are pushing young men into the arms of militants. He muzzled the press, trampled on human rights, allowed religious extremism to curtail the rights of women, enabled military involvement in business and land grabs, and drew Pakistan closer to China and Russia.
Nevertheless, his popularity on the street, boosted by his attacks on the military and political establishment after his was thrown out of office, has only grown. If he did stand for election, he’d likely win with a landslide. And so, said Toor, the Sharifs and their powerful friends have defenestrated the PTI as a viable opponent.
“All of PTI’s leadership are either in jail or in hiding,” he said, describing months of round-ups and detentions of PTI figures and their families. Some PTI members have said they live in fear of a visit from the secret services that would lead them to jail; others said they have not been permitted to leave the country.
Any PTI figure who still wishes to stand can only do so as an independent. Even the cricket bat symbol that the party had hoped to use on ballot papers, essential in a country with almost 60 percent illiteracy, has been banned. “By ensuring that the PTI is not participating in the elections as a party, despite leading in all the public opinion polls, then definitely they (the military) are making way for Nawaz Sharif,” Toor said.
If what goes around truly does, eventually, come around, it’s coming round now to Pakistan. The Sharifs have replaced Khan as the pliant political face of military rule, unwilling or afraid to even mention the rise of militancy during a flaccid election campaign, as doing so would imply criticism of the Army.
The TTP held sway in the northwest for a decade, until the military finally drove them over the border into Afghanistan in 2014. Since the new Al Qaeda-Taliban project became clear in 2021, the TTP has killed scores of people in attacks on local leaders, businesses, schools, as well as police and Army targets. People have marched in their streets in huge numbers, calling for peace.
“The local people have learned through their own bitter experience of devastating war” what a Taliban resurgence means, said Khattak, the analyst. The security establishment is playing a dangerous game, indulging the TTP so that “local people become so desperate they want the military to come in and help them,” he said.
“It’s not an election issue. No one is speaking about it because Afghanistan policy is sourced out to the military. And for them, human life is just collateral damage,” he said.