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Pakistan

Pakistan’s new president: Who is Mamnoon Hussain?

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Pakistan has a new president, Mamnoon Hussain, following a hasty election by the National Assembly and the four provincial assemblies.Pakistan Flag Icon

Given the strength of the hold that the Pakistan Muslim League (N) (PML-N, اکستان مسلم لیگ ن) has on Pakistan’s government following national elections earlier in May, the outcome was never really in doubt, and Hussain is a loyal supporter of newly elected prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

Hussain will succeed Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the late prime minister Benazir Bhutto and the de facto head of Pakistan’s opposition party, the Pakistan People’s Party ( PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی‎), which governed the country from 2008 until the PML-N’s victory earlier this year.  Zardari, whose PPP took power in part due to sympathy from Pakistani voters following Bhutto’s December 2007 assassination, has never been incredibly beloved within the country, and his government soon became unpopular.

Zardari signed off on constitutional reforms stripped the presidency of much of its power in 2010, thereby avoiding impeachment from a flurry of corruption charges, from which Zardari has since been shielded, due to presidential immunity.  By the time Zardari agreed to the constitutional amendment, he faced significant political protests and multiple showdowns with the Pakistani constitutional court.  So the presidency that Hussain will assume is not the same presidency Zardari held and that former military leader and general Pervez Musharraf held before him — the president, for example, no longer has the power to dissolve Pakistan’s parliament or to make key military or foreign policy decisions.

Nonetheless, in his role as a top PPP leader, Zardari remained the most important leader in Pakistani politics, far overshadowing either of the two prime ministers that served him: Yousuf Raza Gillani from 2008 to 2012 and Raja Pervaiz Ashraf from 2012 until 2013.  Gillani himself was forced out of office by Pakistan’s constitutional court when it declared Gillani retroactively disqualified after yet another dispute over corruption charges against Zardari and Gillani’s refusal to cooperate with the constitutional court over the Zardari charges.

 

But Hussain is not Zardari — it’s Sharif, instead, that has long been the head of the PML-N (the ‘N’ in the party’s name stands for Nawaz), and his brother Shahbaz Sharif has been the chief minister of Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province, since 2007.

Hussain, age 73, is a relatively little-known party loyalist, who remained faithful to the PML-N even after Musharraf, then Sharif’s army chief of staff, pushed Sharif out of office and into exile in 1999.  Hussain previously served as the governor of Sindh province (traditionally a PPP stronghold) briefly from June to October 1999, when Musharraf took power by military force.

Hussain is a mohajir, a Muslim born in what is today Uttar Pradesh, India, and has been a textile businessman in Karachi and a former president of the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry.  That makes Hussain somewhat of an outlier within PML-N politics — many of Karachi’s fellow mohajir support the secular Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM, متحدہ قومی موومنٹ), a Karachi-based party that represents mohajir interests and is now so strong that it holds a nearly mafia-like grip on Karachi government.

But in choosing the Karachi-based Hussain, a mohajir who lives in the PPP’s strongest province, Sharif has made a presidential choice that indicates he wants to put a more national stamp on his administration.  Sharif owes his national government to his party’s overwhelming success in Punjab province, home to around 55% of the country’s population, where the PML-N won the majority of its 166 seats to Pakistan’s National Assembly.   Continue reading Pakistan’s new president: Who is Mamnoon Hussain? →

Pakistan

The foreboding political geography of Pakistan’s general election results

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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

Despite his tumble, Imran Khan is the key to Saturday’s Pakistani election

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The final days leading up to Pakistan’s general election this weekend have been dominated by the fate of one man — Imran Khan.Pakistan Flag Icon

With tensions running high over campaign violence, Khan this week was seriously injured, though not by radical Islamist elements, but by falling off a stage at a campaign rally.

Khan tumbled seven feet Tuesday after falling from a forklift when another staffer lost his balance at a campaign rally in Lahore, the capital of Punjab province.  Khan suffered three broken vertebrae and additional head injuries, and Pakistan’s other parties suspended campaigning on Wednesday out of respect for the man who’s become the star of the 2013 campaign.  Khan will not be able to headline any further rallies before the election (today is the final day for active campaigning, in any event), and he won’t physically be able to vote in person on Saturday, either, but he’s already recorded a message for supporters from his hospital bed.

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While the fall may have dampened the prospects for a final campaign rally, it may well have compensated by catapulting Khan into 36 hours of news coverage throughout Pakistan and stepping on the economic reform message of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, whose Pakistan Muslim League (N) (PML-N, اکستان مسلم لیگ ن) was expected to win the largest share of the vote.

But even before the fall, Khan was always going to be the key to determining the outcome of Pakistan’s parliamentary elections.

Some polls show that Khan and his surging nationalist, anti-corruption movement, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice or PTI, پاکستان تحريک) was already gaining ground against both Sharif’s PML-N and the governing Pakistan People’s Party (PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی‎).

A Herald poll earlier this week showed the PML-N with 25.68% support and the PTI with 24.98% support, a statistical dead heat, with the PPP in third place with 17.74% — notably, it showed Khan trailing the PML-N by only single digits in the populous Punjab province and with a huge lead in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan’s northwest.

So who is Imran Khan and how did he become the fulcrum of Pakistan’s 2013 elections?  Continue reading Despite his tumble, Imran Khan is the key to Saturday’s Pakistani election →

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How does Pakistan hold a normal election campaign in the middle of widespread terrorism?

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It’s been 45 years since a presidential candidate in the United States has been murdered by an assassin in cold blood, and not since 1864 has the United States held a presidential election in the middle of a war taking place on U.S. soil.Pakistan Flag Icon

But imagine a national campaign that takes place under constant threat of radical terrorist attack.

That is exactly what’s happening in Pakistan, where a tense campaign has taken place not through the recognizable open-air rallies that mark campaigns throughout the world, but in large part behind closed doors — or at least behind thick glass.

Campaign violence began late in 2012 — members of the pro-U.S., pro-NATO, anti-Taliban Awami National Party (ANP, عوامی نيشنل پارٹی‎ in Urdu, ملي عوامي ګوند‎ in Pashto), the country’s largest Pashtun ethnicity party have long been accustomed to being targets of violence.  But as election day has neared, mainstream parties have been increasingly targeted as well.

The most vulnerable parties have been the incumbent Pakistan People’s Party (PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی‎) of Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the late prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who was killed in December 2007 by assassins, and its allies like the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM, متحدہ قومی موومنٹ), a Karachi-based party.  But even their main rivals, the more conservative Pakistan Muslim League (N) (PML-N, اکستان مسلم لیگ ن) of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif has also been targeted.  The threat of violence is so strong that the PPP has barely held any rallies — it even called off its kickoff rally.  Sharif (pictured above) has campaigned only with extremely cautious protections.

Given that a functioning democracy requires a certain respect for the rule of law and a baseline ability of voters to interact with party leaders and potential prime ministers, the current state in Pakistan is hardly any kind of way to wage a political campaign, and the gruesome toll of violence has led to an eerily subdued campaign season.

The main culprit is the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, تحریک طالبان پاکستان), better known simply as the ‘Pakistan Taliban.’

So what exactly is the TTP and why is it trying to destabilize Pakistan’s election this year?  Continue reading How does Pakistan hold a normal election campaign in the middle of widespread terrorism? →

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

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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 →

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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 →