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Pakistan

The foreboding political geography of Pakistan’s general election results

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Pakistan results

Results are still coming in from Pakistan, but it’s become clear since Saturday that Nawaz Sharif and his party, had clearly won and will form the next government with Sharif leading a relatively strong government as Pakistan’s new prime minister. Pakistan Flag Icon

The clear result and the presence of a strong government is good news for Pakistan and it’s good news for the rest of the world (including India, the United States and others), which has a stake in Pakistan’s stability.  The problems that Sharif faces as Pakistan’s new leader are myriad — a floundering economy, a chronic energy crisis, and increasingly destabilizing attacks from the Tehrek-e-Taliban Pakistan (the Pakistani Taliban).  That’s in addition to touchy endemic questions about cooperation with Pakistan’s military and intelligence leaders, ginger cross-border relations with India and the longstanding military alliance with the United States.

Amid that daunting agenda, it’s been easy to forget that keeping the nuclear-armed Pakistan united as one country is also a priority.  But a quick look at the electoral geography of Saturday’s election demonstrates that Sharif should keep national unity atop his ledger as well.

The most surprising aspect of the election may have been the failure of Imran Khan and his anti-corruption party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice or PTI, پاکستان تحريک), to make significant gains in Punjab province.  Though Punjab is essentially the PML-N’s heartland, and governing Punjab has been the Sharif family business for about three decades, Khan was expected to do better throughout urban Punjbab, especially in Lahore.  That turned out to have been wrong.  The PTI barely won as many seats as the incumbent Pakistan People’s Party (PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی‎), which lost three-fourths of its seats, including the seat of its outgoing prime minister, Raja Pervaiz Ashraf.

But that’s one side of the more intriguing — and, I believe, more enduring — aspect of the Saturday’s result.

That’s the extent to which each of Pakistan’s four provinces essentially supported a different party.  See below a map of results from 2008’s election.  There are certainly regional strongholds, especially with the PML-N (shown below in blue) taking most of its strength in Punjab province.  But the PPP (shown below in red) won seats in all four provinces of the country, including in Punjab.  Likewise, the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) (پاکستان مسلم لیگ ق, or the PML-Q), which supported former military leader Pervez Musharraf throughout the 2000s (shown below in green), won strong support throughout the country.*

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Now take a look at the election map of Saturday’s results from Pakistan’s Dawn:

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The election map this time around isn’t nearly as messy — the PPP’s seats (shown in magenta) come nearly exclusively from Sindh province, the PML-N (shown in light blue) will form a government based almost exclusively on its strength in Punjab  and without any of the national support that the PPP commanded in 2008.  Khan’s PTI (shown in crimson), despite a handful of support in Sindh and Punjab, won most of its seats in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The PPP’s allied liberal Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM, متحدہ قومی موومنٹ) (shown in gray) won all of its seats in Karachi.  That isn’t surprising given that it’s long dominated city politics within Karachi and has virtually no footprint outside Karachi, but it serves as yet another discrete mini-province even within Sindh.

In Balochistan, which borders Iran to its east and Afghanistan to its north, Balochi nationalists, sympathetic independents, and the conservative Islamist Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (جمیعت علمائے اسلام‎) (shown in olive green) dominated.

But that’s not all — provincial elections were also held on Saturday to determine the composition of Pakistan’s four provincial assemblies, and there the contrast is even more striking: Continue reading The foreboding political geography of Pakistan’s general election results →

Pakistan

Amid the PPP’s leadership crisis, where is Bilawal Zardari Bhutto?

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bilawal

I said he was one of the top 13 politicians to watch in 2013 at the beginning of the year, and he’s the next great hope of not just the Bhutto family’s political legacy, but for the entire political fortunes of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی‎),, and the May 2013 elections were supposed to mark his grand entrance into Pakistani politics.Pakistan Flag Icon

But with just a handful of days left in the PPP’s campaign to hold on to power in Pakistan, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has been all but absent from the campaign, and news reports claim that he’s actually no longer within Pakistan due to security threats against him.

The reason? The widespread violence already perpetrated and currently threatened against the PPP in particular by the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, تحریک طالبان پاکستان), the ‘Pakistani Taliban’ terrorist group that opposes the government, above all for its cozy links to U.S. and NATO defense forces.

But the fact that the son of Pakistan’s current president, Asif Ali Zardari, has left the country out of concern for his life, speaks to the current state of Pakistan’s security situation.  Bhutto Zardari, at age 24, is still too young to contest Saturday’s elections, and he was never seriously considered as a possibility to emerge as prime minister in 2013.

His decision proved especially wise today in light of the abduction of Ali Haider Gilani, the son of former PPP prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani.

You can question whether it’s healthy for one family to play such an oversized role in politics (whether the Bhutto family in Pakistan, the Gandhi family in India or even the Bush family in the United States), but there’s no doubt that Bhutto’s family has paid dearly for its starring role in the center of Pakistan’s civilian politics.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who founded the PPP, led Pakistan’s government in the 1970s, but a military government convicted and executed him in 1979.

Benazir Bhutto, who served as prime minister in the 1980s and the 1990s, was assassinated in a December 2007 bomb blast just days after she returned from abroad to contest the 2008 parliamentary elections.

So you can’t really blame Bhutto Zardari for keeping such a low profile — he’s barely just reached adulthood after an adolescence spent mostly abroad, matched by the twin tragedies of his mother’s assassination and the ghost of his grandfather’s execution.

But his absence marks an even wider leadership crisis in Pakistan’s governing party.  Though there are many reasons why the PPP is slumping in the 2013 elections, one factor is certainly the lack of any sort of strong presence at the head of the party.

Although Zardari and his son are the joint leaders of the PPP, Zardari, as Pakistan’s head of state, is unable to take a full-throated role leading the campaign.  Nor would be incredibly effective if he could — he won the presidency in 2008 in part through sympathy for his late wife, Benazir, and his tenure in office has been marked by widespread corruption and impunity.

Gilani, who served as prime minister from 2008 to 2012, was ousted by Pakistan’s supreme court after refusing to facilitate a Swiss investigation into Zardari’s alleged graft.  His successor, Raja Pervez Ashraf, a former water minister, served a largely caretaker role from 2012 until March 2013, and like Gilani, he’s refused to cooperate with Pakistan’s supreme court.  Ashraf, who has his own corruption issues, was initially barred himself from contesting the 2013 parliamentary elections.

That’s left the PPP virtually decapitated throughout the campaign.  That stands in contrast to its two major rivals, the Pakistan Muslim League (N) (PML-N, اکستان مسلم لیگ ن) and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice or PTI, پاکستان تحريک).  The ‘N’ in PML-N stands for Nawaz Sharif, one of Pakistan’s wealthiest businessmen who was twice elected prime minister in the 1990s.  The PTI’s leader, Imran Khan, has been active in Pakistani politics as an anti-corruption crusader for two decades and was a national cricket star in the years prior to his entry into politics.

Photo credit to AFP/Getty Images.

Pakistan

More about Pakistan’s ‘milestone’ and a preview of its upcoming May 11 elections

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zardari

Last weekend, Pakistan’s prime minister Raja Pervez Ashraf heralded the completion of the first full government in Pakistan’s history since partition from India and independence in 1947.Pakistan Flag Icon

Today, Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari (pictured above) announced that new elections for Pakistan’s National Assembly (ایوان زیریں پاکستان‎), the lower house of the Majlis-e-Shoora ( مجلس شوریٰ‎), Pakistan’s parliament, will be held on May 11.

Before jumping into an analysis of Pakistan’s upcoming election, let’s first debunk a few myths.

While the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی‎) deserves some credit in crawling to the five-year finish line and therefore, the end of its term, it’s far from clear that Pakistan has approached anything like a mature democracy, despite Ashraf’s claims that democracy is here to stay for Pakistan. There are reasons to believe that the winner of the May 11 elections might not be as lucky as the previous government, so self-congratulation is quite premature.

Moreover, most decision-making power for truly life-and-death issues lies in the hands of either Pakistan’s military or the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and even then, their power doesn’t extend entirely throughout the entire country — it’s especially weak in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along Pakistan’s northwestern border with Afghanistan.

But it still means that the chief of army staff since 2007 (and director general of the ISI from 2004 to 2007), Ashfaq Kayani (pictured below), is more powerful than Ashraf or even Zardari, even as he’s tried to institute military reforms to reduce the military’s direct role in politics and has pledged to keep the military from interfering in the May elections.  His current term as chief of army staff expires in November 2013.

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The PPP came to power after elections in February 2008, following the end of a nine-year military rule by Pakistani general Pervez Musharraf.  Those elections followed the return and subsequent assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister who had returned to Pakistan in late 2007 following Musharraf’s National Reconciliation Ordinance (which attempted to provide a blanket immunity against former political leaders with respect to corruption) in order to run in the upcoming elections.

Ashraf (pictured below) has been prime minister for less than a year, taking over after a showdown among Pakistan’s Supreme Court, on the one hand, and Zardari and former prime minister Yousuf Raza Gillani, on the other hand, over corruption charges.  Zardari, Pakistan’s president and the Bhutto’s widower, became Pakistan’s president in September 2008, and remains the key power broker within the PPP, though his official power is waning after 2010 constitutional reforms transferred much of the power of the presidency to the prime minister.  Zardari’s term will end in September 2013.

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In his address to Pakistanis on Saturday night, Ashraf admitted that the government has not been able to ‘provide rivers of milk honey,’ but it’s nonetheless attempted to tackle the myriad problems of the predominantly Muslim country of 180 million people, the world’s sixth-most populous.

Those problems include some of the world’s worst corruption (which is very much a bipartisan endeavor in Pakistan), and they include continuous military tension with India, which most recently flared up last month.

Pakistan’s economy has slowed from the Musharraf years, in part due to the abandonment of privatization in favor of a more corporatist state capitalism model championed by Gillani’s government.  More now than ever, relatively weak economic growth plagues Pakistan, even in light of rapid inflation. Furthermore, the PPP government hasn’t made incredible progress on any of the country’s longstanding development issues, including uneven access to water and electricity, widespread poverty, widespread unemployment, illiteracy and poor health care.

That’s all before you come to the issue of global terrorism and Pakistan’s role in harboring some of the world’s most determined Islamic radicals — it was a compound in Abbottabad, remember, where U.S. forces ambushed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

So, no, there’s not much ‘milk and honey’ these days in Pakistan — it ranked as the 13th most failed state in the Fund for Peace’s failed state index in 2012.

Despite a shaky foundation for respecting democratically elected governments, Pakistan features relatively robust political activity that breaks down on a heavily regional basis, and the PPP is far from assured of winning a second consecutive term in office. Continue reading More about Pakistan’s ‘milestone’ and a preview of its upcoming May 11 elections →