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Pakistan’s military regime stages sham election
By Keith Jones
18 February 2008

The elections for Pakistan’s national and provincial assemblies
that are to be held today make a mockery of the most elementary
democratic principles. They have been organized by the military-controlled
government of President Pervez Musharraf, with the backing of
the Bush administration, so as to throttle, not further, the democratic
aspirations of Pakistan’s toilers.

The opposition parties have for months been warning that the
military-intelligence apparatus and its cronies in the Pakistan
Muslim League (Q) are planning to rig the elections, just as they
did those held in 2002.

“This is not going to be a free and fair election,”
said Sherry Rehman, spokeswoman for the Pakistan People’s
Party, Sunday. “We have improvised polling stations coming
up in the last few days. We have firing on our rallies.”

Benazir Bhutto, a two-time prime minister and the prime ministerial
candidate of the PPP, the country’s largest opposition party,
was assassinated on December 27, just hours before she was to
present a group of visiting US lawmakers with evidence that the
ruling clique was planning massive electoral fraud.

The election commission has barred Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz
Sharif, the principal leaders of the other major opposition party,
the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), from contesting the elections.

Terrorist attacks have repeatedly targeted election campaign
events. Strangely—or rather not so strangely given the longstanding
ties between Pakistan’s military-intelligence apparatus and
the Taliban and other Islamic fundamentalist militias—these
attacks have almost entirely spared the parties that support Musharraf,
who seized power in a 1999 military coup and subsequently became
a key US ally in the “war on terror.”

Forty-seven people are now said to have died as the result
of a suicide-bomb attack Saturday on a PPP rally in Parachinar
in Pakistan’s tribal belt.

A spokesman for the Awami National Party (ANP) has blamed the
military for a bomb blast that killed 30 people attending an ANP
election meeting February 10 in Charsadda in the North-West Frontier
Province. “We blame security agencies for the attack,”
said Zahid Khan of the ANP, a party that derives much of its support
from Pakistan’s Pashtun minority. “The agencies want
to create civil war and want to support dictatorship,”

Musharraf prepared for what he has called his regime’s
“third and final step” in the “transition to democracy,”
by imposing martial law November 3. The six-week emergency was
used by Musharraf to terrorize the opposition, impose permanent
and draconian curbs on the press, and purge the top levels of
the judiciary of anyone deemed insufficiently pliant.

More than two months later, several leading oppositionists,
including Aitzaz Ahsan, a prominent PPP activist and the president
of the Pakistani Supreme Court Bar Association, remain in jail
or under house arrest.

Police and the private militias of pro-government landlords
are reported to have threatened and harassed large numbers of
opposition candidates and their supporters.

Journalists, meanwhile, routinely face Anti-Terrorism charges
or the threat of such charges. According to Human Rights Watch,
“After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto ... cases under
the act were registered against dozens of journalists in the southern
province of Sindh.” Journalists in rural areas have been
especially targeted for harassment. “[T]hey have been repeatedly
threatened by police and powerful local figures,” reports
HRW, “prevented from covering news stories or events, such
as protest rallies, had their equipment confiscated, and been
warned that they face arrest if they record or air footage deemed
undesirable by the government.”

On Saturday, police used tear gas and baton-charges to break
up a rally in Quetta organized by the All Parties Democratic Movement
(APDM), a coalition of smaller parties that is advocating an election
boycott.

Musharraf’s new, hand-picked Supreme Court, which quickly
gave its blessing to his patently illegal “re-election”
as president October 6, will be the ultimate official arbiter
of the validity of the election results.

The ground-level organization of the vote is in the hands of
an election commission that has repeatedly demonstrated it subservience
to Musharraf, a national “caretaker” government staffed
with PML (Q) cronies, and local administrations led by Musharraf
allies.

A PPP leader says his party has identified more than one hundred
pro-Musharraf candidates who are closely related to those charged
with running the elections in their electoral constituencies.
“They will use government machinery, government finances
and government funds,” PPP Senator Enver Beg told the BBC.
“... They have the police under their control.”

In the name of preventing terrorist attacks, 80,000 Pakistani
troops and some 400,000 police are to be deployed at polling stations
and other strategic points across the country.

Yet so shaky and desperate is the regime that it cannot be
said with certainty, just hours before the voting is scheduled
to begin, that the sham elections will proceed.

Threats and Denunciations

Musharraf has angrily denounced opinion polls that show that
the PPP and PML (N) together enjoy the support of substantially
more than half of Pakistanis, that the PML (Q) has the support
of no more than 15 percent of voters, and that an overwhelming
majority wants Musharraf to quit. The pollsters, said Musharraf,
are “playing with the peace of the world.”

Information Minister Nisar Memon, meanwhile, has vowed that
the government will crush any protests against the sham elections:
“We have security arrangements to deal with them sternly.”

Many foreign groups have refused to monitor the elections because
of the patently undemocratic conditions under which they are being
held. The US Republican Party’s International Republican
Institute pulled out of election monitoring after Pakistani authorities
said it was forbidden to conduct exit polls.

The European Union has sent a small number of observers and
several leading US Democratic Party politicians, including Senators
Joe Biden and John Kerry, will be on hand. They will be monitoring
a miniscule fraction of the 60,000-plus polling stations.

Even the Bush administration, which has repeatedly praised
the dictator Musharraf as a dedicated democrat, concedes that
there will be widespread electoral fraud. US Assistant Secretary
of State for South Asia Richard Boucher recently told a US Congressional
committee, “On a scale from terrible to great, it’ll
be somewhere in the middle.”

Washington’s attempts to save the Musharraf
regime

The Bush administration has defended Musharraf through thick
and thin, including conniving in his imposition of martial law
and purge of the judiciary three months ago. Earlier this month,
Boucher said Musharraf would be within his rights as president
to disband the newly elected national assembly should it seek
to impeach him.

But for the past year Washington has been seeking to give Pakistan’s
military-dominated regime a “democratic” face-lift,
because it recognizes the current government faces mass opposition
and in virtually all sections of society. Musharraf’s staunch
support for the Bush administration’s predatory wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq has riled the population, which is well aware of Washington’s
role in sustaining a succession of military dictatorships in Islamabad.
The Musharraf regime claims to have presided over unprecedented
economic growth, but its neo-liberal policies have produced increasing
poverty and economic insecurity for the majority of Pakistanis.
In recent weeks, the country has been rocked by food and fuel
shortages. Sections of the bourgeois elite are angered by the
extent to which the military and its cronies have monopolized
both political power and the profits from Pakistan’s recent
capitalist growth. One expression of this is the growth of regional
tensions within the Pakistani state, in particular the re-emergence
of a nationalist insurgency in Baluchistan.

The Bush administration and indeed the entire US political
establishment view the Pentagon’s decades-long intimate alliance
with the Pakistani military as pivotal to US interests and ambitions
in Central Asia and the Middle East. In recent weeks, as Pakistan
has been buffeted by crisis, a parade of top US military and intelligence
officials have gone to Islamabad to discuss increased cooperation
between the US and Pakistani militaries, aimed, in the first instance,
at suppressing armed opponents of the US occupation of Afghanistan
operating in Pakistan.

Washington is anxious for the military to remain the dominant
force in Pakistan’s government, but calculates that this
can be best accomplished by it ceding a measure of power to the
traditional political parties.

Toward this end, the Bush administration spent much of 2007
trying to engineer a rapprochement between Musharraf and Bhutto
and her PPP.

Bhutto was more than willing to oblige. But a power-sharing
deal could never be cemented because of opposition from sections
of the government and military, including Musharraf himself, and
because the political dynamics kept changing as popular opposition
to the government swelled.

The PPP broke a tenuous alliance with Sharif’s PML (N)
and facilitated Musharraf’s phony election as president,
while the regime adopted a National Reconciliation Ordinance giving
Bhutto and other PPP leaders amnesty from corruption charges.
Yet the very day of her return to Pakistan from almost a decade
in exile, Bhutto was the target of an assassination attempt, for
which she held elements in and around the government responsible.

The Bush administration’s plans for a recalibrated Musharraf-led
regime were further thrown askew by his having to resort to martial
law to quash the constitutional challenge to his phony re-election
and then by Bhutto’s murder—a murder which the regime
has blamed on the Taliban, but which a majority of Pakistanis
believe was orchestrated by the military, PML (Q) leaders, and/or
Washington.

The Bush administration is now hoping to use the sham elections
as a mechanism to bring the PPP and possibly the PML (N) into
a new relationship with the military.

Boucher’s claim that there will be a middling level of
fraud indicates that the Bush administration expects and is willing
to countenance Musharraf and the military manipulating the results.
But it is hoping to prevail upon them to see the wisdom of allowing
the PPP its status as the country’s largest party and some
share of governmental power and patronage.

Significantly, Associated Press cited Sunday an unnamed Western
diplomat as arguing that the opinion polls had understated the
electoral support Musharraf’s allies will receive. “One
Western diplomat said the pro-Musharraf party still retains the
support of many powerful landowning families in Punjab, the most
populous province and the key electoral battleground. Poor farmers
traditionally follow the advice of their landlords on how to vote—regardless
of personal views.

“The diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because
of the sensitivity of commenting on Pakistani affairs, predicted
that the two opposition parties would fall short of enough seats
to form a government and that the country could end up with a
broad coalition possibly including the ruling party—a move
that would block any move to impeach Musharraf.”

The PPP and the PML (N)

The PPP and the PML (N) have both threatened to launch mass
protests against any election-rigging. But over the last six years
they have made countless threats to launch a popular movement
against the Musharraf regime. The reality is the two parties speak
for rival factions of the Pakistani bourgeoisie and as such are
acutely aware that the military is the bulwark of their class
privileges and the integrity of the Pakistani state. They rightly
fear that any intervention of Pakistani masses into the political
situation could quickly spin out of their control, resulting in
the raising of demands that broaden the call for democracy to
include socio-economic demands and the breaking of the US-Pakistani
military-security nexus, and expose the deep class cleavages within
the military itself.

The PML (N) has made a great show of insisting that it will
never work with Musharraf and of demanding that the sacked Supreme
and High court judges be reinstated. In part this is because of
the intense personal animosity that exists between Sharif and
Musharraf, who deposed him. A second factor is the need for the
PML (N), an avowedly right-wing party with the close ties to both
the military establishment and the religious right, to burnish
its popular credentials. Sharif, the scion of a family of industrialists,
began his political career as a protégé of the last
military dictator before Musharraf, General Zia al-Haq. If the
pro-Musharraf party is called the PML (Q) it is because the majority
of its members and leaders are defectors from Sharif’s party.
Indeed, in recent weeks, while castigating Musharraf as a dictator,
Sharif has been welcoming back into his party a goodly number
of these erstwhile Musharraf allies.

The PPP, now led in dynastic-fashion by Benazir Bhutto’s
husband Asif Ali Zardari (until their son is ready to assume his
“inheritance”), has focused its election campaign all
but entirely on Bhutto’s “martyrdom,” the better
to avoid any discussion of its program.

The PPP describes itself as the party of the poor. But the
first PPP government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, its “socialist”
rhetoric notwithstanding, quickly came into violent conflict with
the working class. The governments Benazir Bhutto led in the late
1980s and 1990s imposed IMF-style austerity policies. The PPP
election manifesto boasts of its commitment to export-led growth
and its role in pioneering privatization and other pro-big business
measures.

Zardari and the PPP leadership have been careful not to rule
out a post-election deal with Musharraf. Zardari has repeatedly
said he will determine whether he can work with the autocrat Musharraf
based on the “fairness” of the elections, in other words
how many seats the military-dominated regime allows to be allotted
to the PPP. Speaking Sunday, the PPP head called for national
unity, i.e., some type of political arrangement to be forged with
the military and their US sponsors. Said Zardari, “I think
we have reached the breaking point where if we don’t band
together we will lose this great nation which we call Pakistan
today.”

Sixty years of Pakistani independence have conclusively demonstrated
that the venal national bourgeoisie is hostile to democracy and
utterly incapable of resolving any of the burning social problems
that confront the country’s toiling masses.

Democracy in Pakistan will not be won in alliance with the
PPP, PML, and various other political parties of the bourgeoisie,
but only by the working class placing itself at the head of the
toiling masses and linking the struggle for democratic rights
with a challenge to Pakistan’s reactionary socio-economic
order.

Genuine democracy requires the liquidation of landlordism,
the dismantling of the US sponsored military-security state, the
separation of mosque from state, socialist measures to provide
jobs and a secure income for all, and the overthrow of the communal
state system that imperialism imposed on South Asia, with the
connivance of the Indian National Congress and Muslim League,
in 1947-48. It will be realized only in the form of a workers’
and peasants’ government that consciously links the fate
of the toilers of Pakistan and South Asia to the international
working class’ struggle to put an end to capitalism.

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