Pakistan seems to be hurtling toward a hasty and flawed election on January 8th 2008, one called after the November 3rd 2007 second coup by President Pervez Musharraf that allowed him to dispense with the meddling Supreme Court, the hobbling Constitution of Pakistan, irritating broadcast media, and activist members of the legal profession that had led the opposition to his rule in Pakistan's Prague Spring of last March. Today, as some Pakistani politicians continue to find ways to stay in the election game while talking of boycotts, only the Men and some Women in Black, the country's lawyers, are still out on the streets protesting against the incarceration of their colleagues. Their earlier protests in March against the removal of the Chief Justice ushered in Pakistan's Prague Spring, a flash of the democratic impulse, eventually crushed by the power of the state. Unless things change, the country may have to wait for its Velvet Revolution for a long time though many in Pakistan hope not the 20 years that Czechs and Slovaks had to wait for their democracy to erupt and take hold in 1989.
Today a compliant and stacked Supreme Court in Pakistan has sanctioned General Musharraf's self-confessed extra-constitutional moves under the Doctrine of Necessity that provided absolution for earlier autocratic regimes. Opponents of the regime, including the President of the Supreme Court Bar association, Aitzaz Ahsan, are under detention without charges. They may only be released if pressure from abroad mounts on the regime. Declarations of the imminent danger from internal and external enemies of the state are being used again to define a Pakistani-style "democracy". In Pakistan's first military dictatorship of the late1950s and 1960s, this was defined as democracy that was attuned to the "genius" of the people, or rather their lack of it.
Pakistan may be in danger. But that danger really resides in the failure of the State to trust its own people by allowing them to vent their feelings in public, associate in groups, speak freely, and exercise their right to choose their leaders without fraud or hindrance. And in the shortchanging of the peoples' participation in shaping their own future, by leaders who think Pakistan is not ready for those freedoms that many others enjoy the world over.
Now a foreshortened and politically-engineered election campaign will act as a fig leaf to show to the Western World, allowing the West to declare victory on the road to democracy and move on. The ones who will suffer most from this suffocating governmental control are the moderates who are not as well organized as the Islamic parties. That is the paradox behind the West's tacit support of the current situation in Pakistan. It militates against the very forces of moderation that might keep Pakistan from the hands of the extremists. Most notably President George Bush and his administration speak of democracy and elections, but they do not speak of the need to restore the judiciary that gave the country hope of democracy. Their silence speaks volumes to the Pakistani people.
As the National Democratic Institute (NDI) team under Senator Tom Daschle stated recently after visiting Pakistan: "The importance of preserving the independence of the judiciary has never been more critical in Pakistan and cannot be overstated. ....Pakistan's courts perform an important role in elections. Election Commissioners are drawn from the High Courts and Returning Officers are also recruited from the judicial system."
The way things are developing now, there will be an election, of sorts. Musharraf has declared that it will happen "come hell or high water." Foreign observers will be allowed in, eventually. Not early enough to get to know the scene or enough in numbers to cover the countryside and its 65,000 polling stations, nor to be able to spot the rigging that will take place at the district and sub-district level, where pro-government local councils already control the administrative machinery and man the polling stations.
In 2002, the last major elections, there were some 70 million voters on the electoral polls. Even then as Agence France Presse reported: "The EU Election Observer Mission (EUOM) "has solid evidence to believe that public authorities from local administration up to senior levels of governance were actively involved in partisan electioneering," EU chief observer John Cushnahan said."This appeared to be a pattern throughout the country,'" At the beginning of 2007, there were some 10-20 million less and not due to sudden mortality. Later in the year, the Chief Election Commissioner announced there were 80 million voters registered. One foreign observer commented wryly to me that this was done by simply merging the 50 million of 2007 with the 70 million of 2002 together and removing some overlap. Yet many urban voters found their names missing from the rolls. And election officers have the power to reject nomination papers of candidates almost at will. Last Friday the election application of Shahbaz Sharif, President of the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz group, was rejected because he is a loan defaulter. On Monday 3 December, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had his papers rejected. Meanwhile many members of the government-supported Pakistan Muslim League Q group and other parties, who too have been loan defaulters but whose loans were written off by the Musharraf regime, will contest without much hindrance. Prime Minister Bhutto's papers were accepted without let. So the playing field will be uneven.
This is how Pakistan election experts and past foreign election observers see the situation develop: The electoral rolls suddenly swell with missing "ghost" voters, many of them women in veil, who do not need identity cards with photos to cast their votes. So, some women voting agents will vote early and often for the official party. And the newly-added ghost voters will have their votes cast for them. ID cards will be rented for the day and then returned after voting takes place. Polls will close, results delayed, and ballots added afterward.
The moderate parties have dynastic or feudal leadership and they have not prepared their own staff to operate democratically inside their own parties or to learn to counter such rigging techniques. Nor have they taken advantage of training offered by the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the NDI to the same extent as the Islamic parties. This follows the pattern in the Middle East, according to an upcoming book edited by Marina Ottaway for Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where the Islamists take advantage of election training in larger numbers than other parties. No wonder that the political space is being lost by the moderates in the Muslim World.
Rather than forming a single alliance as the Islamists did, the parties of former prime ministers Bhutto and Sharif have failed to become true allies because they represent different segments of the political spectrum: he to the right of center, she to the left. By taking the battle against political dissent to the forces of moderation, Musharraf may have produced the unintended consequence of further empowering the Islamic parties. The Islamic parties are noticeable by their absence from street protests against Musharraf's second coup. Don't be surprised if they end up doing better than expected in the January 2008 polls in Pakistan and becoming key members of any coalition government. With that Trojan Horse inside the gates of power, the state of Pakistan, and eventually control of its nuclear arsenal, may yet become vulnerable to the obscurantist forces within.
Musharraf still has time to undo some of the damage of his November 3rdcoup. He could catalyze the moderate parties by freeing the judiciary and the media again. Then it would not be one man holding back that Islamist tide but the whole center of the Pakistani nation. Let them help him in fighting obscurantism and blind religiosity, thus bringing on Pakistan's Velvet Revolution much sooner than the one that followed the Prague Spring in distant Europe. Today less than a third of Pakistanis polled by the IRI in October said they favor him to lead the country. He can win over the moderate majority by trusting them to do the right thing at the polls. He could present himself to the new assemblies to be re-affirmed as President. Then he can leave his office with dignity and even pride, hopefully sooner than the end of his five-year term in 2012, and maybe with a legacy that Pakistanis could learn to respect.
Shuja Nawaz, a political analyst, is the author of Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its army, and the wars within (forthcoming) from Oxford University Press. He regularly appears as a commentator on television, radio, and at think tanks.