No Matter Who Wins Pakistan’s Vote, the Nation Loses

 
Husain Haqqani  The military thinks elections give it a facade to rule from above. But that plan keeps backfiring.

More than 100 million Pakistanis will have the chance to cast their ballots in general elections on July 25, but the vote is already tainted by the blatant meddling of the country’s all-powerful military, with a series of assists by a partisan judiciary. This interference—by what is known locally as the establishment—ensures that whatever the results on election day, the outcome will not rid Pakistan of its chronic instability and poor civil-military relations.

The establishment wants to root out the two parties that have dominated the political scene for the last three decades: the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP).

The PML-N, led by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, is popular among ethnic Punjabis, who constitute about half of Pakistan’s population. The PPP­—of the late Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and now run by her widower, former President Asif Ali Zardari—draws on its traditional support in the southern Sindh province. From the establishment’s perspective, the two parties represent entrenched dynasties that will never see eye to eye with the military on foreign policy and national security.

Army generals deem both Sharif and Zardari corrupt and are instead advancing the fortunes of the star former cricketer Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party.

Although Khan has been in politics since 1997, he has fared poorly at the ballot box in the three parliamentary elections he and his party have so far contested. He has never held any government position, and most accounts suggest he is ill-prepared for the responsibility of running a nuclear-armed country of more than 200 million people. Moreover, most of his party’s candidates this time are former PML and PPP parliamentarians persuaded—or coerced—by the military to defect and join the PTI. And so, while Khan would be a first-time prime minister, his government would comprise some of the same people whose corruption he has decried throughout his political career.

The establishment has orchestrated an elaborate set of legal and political moves to pave the way for Khan’s victory. The most important of these moves was the removal of Sharif as prime minister one year ago. After a corruption investigation sparked by the leaked Panama Papers, Supreme Court Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar disqualified Sharif for failing to fulfil an arcane constitutional criteria for “honesty and sagacity.” Sharif was then put on trial and convicted, along with his daughter Maryam, for failing to explain their ownership of property in London.

Pakistan’s politicians are notorious for corruption, but even Sharif’s detractors acknowledge the court overreached. In effect, Nisar forced an elected prime minister to resign before facing a proper trial in a criminal court.

Foreign Policy Magazine

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