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Pakistan

Musharraf didn’t need the Peshawar High Court to render him politically irrelevant

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Pakistan’s former leader, Pervez Musharraf, has been barred from Pakistani civilian politics for life, following a ruling this week by the Peshawar High Court, the highest court in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Pakistan Flag Icon

Musharraf, who took power as army chief of staff in 1999, ousting prime minister Nawaz Sharif at the time, left office in 2008 to the first truly free and fair elections since the 1997 election that Sharif and his Pakistan Muslim League (N) (PML-N, اکستان مسلم لیگ ن) won.

After five years outside the country, Musharraf was hoping to return to Pakistan from self-imposed exile under the banner of his newly formed (as of 2010, at least) All Pakistan Muslim League (APML, آل پاکستان مسلم لیگ).  The faction that supported Musharraf throughout the 2000s, the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) (پاکستان مسلم لیگ ق, or the PML-Q), is no longer much of a factor, and what remains of the PML-Q now supports the ruling — and fading — Pakistan People’s Party (PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی‎).

Though the PPP is struggling in advance of the May 11 elections, Musharraf has never been thought the likely benefactor.  Instead, Sharif, the prime minister that Musharraf ousted over a decade ago and who returned to Pakistan from his own exile in late 2007, leads polls in the May elections and is expected to win on the basis of his party’s wide support in Punjab province, the country’s most populous by far.

Musharraf retains pockets of support, especially within Pakistan’s military.  But when he returned to the country on March 24, only about 300 supporters even bothered to greet him at Karachi’s airport.  Things have gone downhill ever since for Musharraf, whose recent lifetime political ban is the least of his legal worries.  Musharraf was disqualified from running by election officials in four locations throughout the country, and he’s now subject to at least three other investigations, one of which forced him to flee a courtroom earlier in April over charges that he committed treason for declaring emergency rule in 2007.  Even more immediately, he’s been placed under house arrest in respect of the investigation into the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, who returned from her own exile in 2007 as well to run for office at the head of the PPP.  Musharraf isn’t believed to have actively participated or planned the bombing and shooting  attack, but he’s been accused of failing to provide Bhutto sufficient protection at the time.   Continue reading Musharraf didn’t need the Peshawar High Court to render him politically irrelevant →

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 →

Pakistan

Everything you need to know about the showdown between the Pakistan People’s Party and the Supreme Court of Pakistan

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So you already know that Pakistan is, well, kind of a hot mess, as far as governance is concerned.

You also know that the Muslim country of 180 million has had, since Partition from India in 1947, a helter-skleter relationship with democratic institutions, with periods of civilian rule interspersed with healthy intervals of autocratic military regimes.  You know that on many vectors, Pakistan falls short of what even its neighbors have accomplished, not just with respect to democracy, but also with respect to rule of law, corruption, terrorism, press freedom and so on.  (Think of Pakistan, perhaps, as a 21st century version of mid-20th century Argentina, or any other South American country where democracy didn’t quite take, despite strong party identification.)

You know that Pakistan is a traditional U.S. ally and a key strategic relationship in the ongoing U.S. efforts in Afghanistan (and along the Af-Pak border), but that Pakistan’s political and military establishment rarely speaks with one voice and that Pakistan’s government more often hinders than helps the U.S. government in its ongoing anti-terror efforts.

But what of the latest political crisis there?  The prime minister has been dismissed by the Supreme Court? And the new prime minister may be dismissed as well? All because of some corruption charges against the president? But isn’t basically every public official in Pakistan corrupt?

It’s understandable that a crisis like this could leave your head spinning in a run-of-the-mill democracy, but in a place like Pakistan, with so many extrapolitical considerations, it’s nearly incomprehensible.

Without further ado, Suffragio presents a quick primer on what’s happened so far in the showdown, and what we might expect in the near future. Continue reading Everything you need to know about the showdown between the Pakistan People’s Party and the Supreme Court of Pakistan →