Rubin: Across the Borderline -- Pashtuns and Taliban in Two States

I was delayed in posting several items by some travel. I apologize for the delay and will get them up in the next couple of days.

First note: Changes are afoot in the lands of Pashtuns.

In the couple of weeks before the February 18 elections in Pakistan, attacks by presumed “Taliban” killed over 140 Pashtuns in Kandahar (Afghanistan) and over 25 Pashtuns in Charsadda (Northwest Frontier Province, Pakistan). After the elections they attacked a Pashtun wedding in Swat and killed 14 people, including the bride. Despite (or because of) this terror, the predominantly Pashtun electorate of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province marginalized the pro-Taliban political parties in the February 18 elections. The staunchly anti-Taliban Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party will dominate NWFP's delegation to the national parliament and will form the next government of the NWFP in alliance with the PPP; the two parties control 60 percent of the seats in the NWFP Legislative Assembly.

The ANP (about which more later) is closely allied to the government of Hamid Karzai in Kabul and opposed to both military rule in Pakistan and a mainly military approach to the challenge of militancy. Its victory poses an insoluble problem to the Cold-War minded Bush clique, which cannot conceive that a non-violent democratic party could be a better partner for opposing jihadi terrorism than a military dictator. (John McCain has shown his faithful following of this delusion, calling for continued support for Musharraf, while no Democratic candidate has yet shown an understanding of the possibilities created by the Pakistan elections).

I am hoping (but not too optimistic) that I will never again have to listen to people (especially, but not exclusively, Pakistani government officials) arguing that the Taliban are just Pashtuns fighting against foreign occupation and a Tajik-dominated central government in Kabul. And, consequently, that only a Pakistani regime dominated by the “pro-American” military can be a partner for the US in the struggle against extremism.

These persistent stereotypes make me wonder: why did a Taliban “Pashtun insurgency” kill hundreds of Pashtuns in Kandahar, while Tajiks and Uzbeks quietly went about their business from Badakhshan to Bukhara? Who are the foreign occupiers in Charsadda and Swat? Why are Uzbek and Chechen “Taliban” terrorizing Pashtun schoolgirls in Mardan, NWFP (threatening to attack their schools if they did not wear burqas, as I was told by a young Pashtun from Mardan in Islamabad in November, who feared for his sister)? Because they resent the fact that the Panjshiri Tajik Marshall Muhammad Qasim Fahim was Afghan Minister of Defense from December 2001 to December 2004? To drive the Canadians out of Kandahar? If Taliban are “just Pashtuns” (as a researcher at a Pakistani think tank told me recently), then who was voting in NWFP on February 18?

In Kandahar on Sunday February 22 a suicide bomber killed over a hundred people at a dog fight. (Left, the scene minutes after the bombing.) If you find an attack on a sporting event puzzling, read Whitney Azoy's book, Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan, or the late Clifford Geertz's essay, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." (Or reflect on the strange career of George W. Bush, former owner of the Texas Rangers, who has displayed the transformational power of freedom by making Iraq safe for baseball.)

Through such public games, people (men, usually) enact conflict and display their power. Azoy's book on Buzkashi (the game of north Afghanistan wherein teams of horsemen compete to snatch the body of a sacrificial victim -- calf or goat), ends, as I recall, with the author in the Kabul airport. He is on his way out of the country within days after the coup d'état by Soviet-trained military officers in April 1978. He asks one of his Afghan friends, "What will happen now?" The friend replied, "You should know. You've been studying it. Now the buzkashi will begin."

In Kandahar the enactment was close enough to the reality that even fundamentalists (who, regardless of affiliation, sometimes have difficulties processing metaphor, just like schizophrenics) could detect it. The sponsor of one of the dogs fighting was Abdul Hakim Jan, who appears to have been the main target -- the suicide bomber detonated himself so close to him that his remains have not been found.

Abdul Hakim had been a commander in the jihad against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s and served as the police chief of Kandahar during the mujahidin government in the 1990s. He was a follower of the late Mullah Naqibullah, the major mujahid commander of the Alikozai tribe. Abdul Hakim had the reputation of a fierce opponent of the Taliban and Pakistani influence in Afghanistan -- several people in Kandahar say he was the only commander there who never abandoned resistance to the Taliban. His Arghandab district of Kandahar saw active revolt against forced conscription by the Taliban during their rule. According to a note from Sarah Chayes (order her book here, her soap here), Abdul Hakim was recently appointed the commander of the Afghan National Auxiliary Police (a new force intended to create a community-based "surge" against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan) in Arghandab. He was known as the best military tactician among the Alikozai fighters. According to Sarah, "What this is really about is opening Arghandab for the spring offensive." Another observer in Kandahar (who must remain anonymous) concurs: “Now Arghandab is wide-open for the Taliban to come in. And once Arghandab falls, everyone knows the next step.” Dear reader, should you not be among “everyone” – the “next step” is the fall of Kandahar.

After the death of Mullah Naqibullah (left) last October, Taliban briefly invaded Arghandab, even dancing on the roof of Mullah Naqibullah's house. They were expelled, largely by forces led by Abdul Hakim Jan, but signs point to a planned offensive in the spring, made easier by the successive deaths of Alikozai leaders. The modus operandi of the dog-fight killing bears all the earmarks of a suicide operation carried out by Afghan or Pakistani Taliban who have learned their technique from al-Qaida, but the Taliban’s public denial of involvement may be intended to exacerbate tribal tensions by aggravating doubts about who was responsible.

The day after the operation against Abdul Hakim Jan, someone (presumed to be Taliban) exploded another suicide bomb in Kandahar province, in the border district of Spin Boldak. This attack, which killed 38 Pashtun civilians, may have been aimed at a Canadian military unit. Canada is in charge of the NATO military command in Kandahar and is facing a divisive internal conflict over its commitment to Afghanistan that the bombers may have intended to influence.

An analyst in Afghanistan (whose position requires anonymity) has sent me confidential data showing that “security incidents” by “anti-government elements” in Afghanistan in early 2008 have exceeded those at the same season in 2007. Last year the late winter increase led to a spring escalation of asymmetrical attacks (suicide bombings and IEDs); this year the curve looks higher, perhaps presaging a larger offensive. Of course this offensive will not include conventional attacks (including tank battles, artillery duels, close air support, saturation bombing, or nuclear strikes), the lack of which has in the past led the Pentagon to claim that the Taliban are being defeated.

The major threat to the Taliban offensive, however, is not from the front but from the rear: Pakistan. For years, the Pashtun nationalists led by the Awami National Party have argued that support for the Taliban comes not from the Pashtun population but from the Pakistani security services and jihadi parties that use Pashtun lands, and especially the tribal agencies, as platforms for covert operations. Even if the military has lost control of some of these actors, who now threaten the army itself, many of its strategists still consider jihadis a tool against the threat posed not only by India but by a potential US-India alliance.

The ANP’s origins go back to the Khudai Khidmatgaran (Servants of God) or Red Shirts, founded by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (right, with Mahatma Gandhi) in the 1920s. Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who is buried in the Afghan city of Jalalabad near the tomb of Amir Amanullah Khan, the reformist ruler whom he admired, was known as the Frontier Gandhi for his espousal of independence, non-violence and village-based egalitarian social reform. Because the Pashtun nationalists originally allied with the Indian National Congress rather than with what they saw as the Muslim League’s communalist and reactionary orientation, the Pakistan establishment has always treated them as potential or actual enemies of the state, even after they proclaimed support for new state of Pakistan. Their leaders were arrested in the 1970s when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto suppressed an insurgency in Baluchistan. Some were rearrested by the Zia regime in the 1980s, while others sought refuge in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.

The Pashtun nationalists (unlike Baluch separatists) have always supported non-violent resistance to Pakistani dictatorships and central domination. They have tended to look to the Afghan government as a protector of Pashtun interests – they had good relations with the royal regime, with President Daud Khan, the Soviet-supported regime (especially Najibullah), and, since 2001, with the government of Hamid Karzai.

I witnessed the intimate relations between the ANP and the Karzai government, on my first trip to Kabul after the overthrow of the Taliban. Waiting for the UN flight from Islamabad in March 2002, a week before the Nawruz holiday, I saw Afrasiab Khattak waiting for the same flight. Khattak, who is now the Secretary of the ANP in the NWFP, was the main speaker at the February 9 Charsadda rally attacked by the Taliban. I had met him years earlier when he had been honored in New York by Human Rights Watch for his work as a lawyer and chair of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

In March 2002 Afrasiab (left, with Asma Jahangir) and I were both part of a small foreign delegation of "friends of Afghanistan" invited by the new government to celebrate the first Nawruz after the Taliban’s ouster. During the following week, though I managed to evade most of the official events organized by our hosts, I had the opportunity to dine with Afrasiab with President Karzai in the Arg (Presidential Palace) and with Interior Minister Yunus Qanuni in his office, and to tour with him the devastated plain north of Kabul, where the Taliban and al-Qaida had carried out scorched earth tactics, burning houses, felling orchards, and uprooting vineyards.

Over the succeeding years I frequently saw Afrasiab in Kabul, where he had lived as a political exile under Najibullah, during the military dictatorship of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. (He had roomed with Najibullah at one time at a student hostel in Peshawar.) I noticed that he and his fellow Pashtun nationalists enjoyed as much trust in Kabul – and not only among Pashtuns – as their military rulers provoked distrust. In Islamabad and later on a visit to the US Afrasiab also introduced me to ANP leader Asfandiar Wali Khan, grandson of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and son of Khan Abdul Wali Khan.

By chance the six-foot-four Wali Khan had sat next to me on a flight from Peshawar to Karachi in November 1986, and I had an opportunity to observe how passengers brought their children to shake hands with the inheritor of a great legacy. At a time when the Reagan administration was pouring billions of dollars of sophisticated weapons into the most Islamist parties of the Afghan mujahidin, Wali Khan patiently explained to me why he thought arming Islamic extremists was a dangerous response to the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. This position alienated the Pashtun nationalists of Pakistan from some of the Afghans who had sought refuge on their soil. At the time I too thought that Wali Khan was making judgments about Afghanistan a bit too much on the basis of Pakistani domestic politics.

Asfandiar Khan and Afrasiab hosted Ahmed Rashid (author of the best-seller, Taliban) and me as guests at the “Pashtun Peace Jirga” that the ANP organized in Peshawar in November 2006. True to their democratic, pluralistic, and non-violent tradition, the ANP invited representatives of the entire political spectrum of Pashtuns in Pakistan, from the fiery Quetta-based nationalist Mahmud Khan Achakzai, who dwelt perhaps excessively on the perfidy of the British in dividing Pashtuns in the nineteenth century, to the wily Maulana Fazlur Rahman, leader of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema Deobandi party often seen as the godfather of the Taliban. Today Fazlur Rahman is a target of the new generation of Taliban, who see him as a sellout to the Pakistani establishment for his political alliance with Musharraf.

Fazlur Rahman’s party was the largest grouping in the Islamist alliance, the MMA (Mutahhida Majlis-i Amal, or United Action Council), which then controlled the provincial government of NWFP. In his speech to the jirga, Fazlur Rahman portrayed the Taliban as a movement of resistance to foreign occupation. He ambiguously held out hope of a political solution, arguing that he would not deny to others what the claimed for himself – the right to compete peacefully in elections – but that the withdrawal of foreign troops was a condition for Taliban to lay down their arms.

The ANP leaders took a different tack. Those whose views of Pashtuns are largely formed by Rudyard Kiping and his epigone, Pervez Musharraf, might be surprised to learn that the senior figure of the leading lineage of Pashtun nationalists placed great emphasis on the peaceful nature of Pashtun culture. He deplored that Pashtuns had become portrayed as terrorists and extremists throughout the world and argued that the tribal code, Pashtunwali, placed strict limits on the taking of life, and could never justify the type of violence now taking place throughout the lands of Pashtuns – with Pashtuns as its primary victims.

I encountered similar concerns the following year in a conversation with an official of the Afghan Presidency in Kabul. After this Pashtun official and I exchanged astonishment at the charges from Pakistan that the Afghan government was dominated by non-Pashtuns (the contrary charges by Afghan non-Pashtuns seemed to have more merit), I asked him what was President Karzai’s main concern. His answer surprised me – he said, “education” – and not just in the sense that Afghanistan has one of the world’s lowest rates of both literacy and professional training. President Karzai, he said, was particularly worried at the constant attacks on schools in the Pashtun areas of the country by “Taliban.” Nobody, least of all these “Pashtun” insurgents, was attacking Tajik, Uzbek, or Hazara schools – only Pashtun schools. Who wanted Pashtuns to be uneducated and weak? Who was attacking the future of Pashtuns? The unspoken answer was, neither non-Pashtuns in Afghanistan nor a “Pashtun insurgency”: the attack was coming from across the Durand Line.

[There are of course many domestic factors promoting the insurgency in Afghanistan – especially corrupt and abusive local governance; and actions by the Coalition and NATO that kill civilians or result in lengthy detention and fears of torture and abuse, certainly facilitate recruitment. But the secure foreign base for leadership and logistics transforms protest or resistance into an insurgency.]

According to Asfandiar Wali Khan and the ANP, the extremists, including the Taliban and al-Qaida, had been created on Pashtun land to serve strategic interests, of the US and Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, of Pakistan in the 1990s and thereafter. These powers had used the vulnerability and poverty of Pashtuns, to transform their lands into bases for extremist movements that exploited rather than represented the needs of Pashtuns.

The answer, according to the ANP, was democracy and federalism, not centralized military dictatorship and jihad. The Pakistan military has marketed its services to the US as the only force in Pakistan that would or could battle the militants – whereas the militants were that military’s own creation in its battle against domestic democracy and foreign enemies. The ANP’s program calls for the abolition of the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies that shelter the militants and the integration of their people and territory into a federal, democratic Pakistan. In that Pakistan, FATA would join a new province, named not the “Northwest Frontier,” after its security function in the British Empire, but “Pakhtunkhwa,” after its people,. The ANP has chosen this name, not “Pashtunistan,” the term used by Afghan irredentists, to emphasize that the goal is not separatism but participation as full citizens of Pakistan, like Sindhis, Punjabis, and Baluch, each of which has an eponymous province. Bringing FATA into the “mainstream,” which is part of the program of all the parties that won the recent elections, would constitute the best guarantee against the use of these territories against Afghanistan, Pakistani democracy, or anyone else, including the US and Europe.

If Pashtuns received such recognition of their identity and guarantees of their participation within Pakistan, the ANP would reverse the long history of Pashtun nationalism by recognizing the Durand Line as a border distributing Pashtuns between two states, and it would urge Kabul to do likewise. Once Pashtuns could participate as full citizens in both states, an open border could become a focus of cooperation rather than conflict. Such a settlement of issues surrounding the border could also help calm inter-ethnic relations in Afghanistan, where non-Pashtuns have at times feared the use by Kabul of the tribes across the Durand Line to suppress them and rulers have exploited the historic grievance over colonial borders as a symbol in ethnic politics.

On the day of the Pashtun Peace Jirga, Ahmed Rashid and I were invited to lunch with the then Governor of NWFP, General Muhammad Jan Orakzai. The lunch was a product of the good offices of Mushahid Hussain, Secretary-General of the PML-Q (Musharraf’s party) and chair of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Pakistani Senate. Mushahid had told the Governor that I was a “friend of Pakistan,” either because I had recommended in a report that Afghanistan should recognize the Durand Line, or because of a speech I had given at Mushahid's instigation several days earlier at a celebration of the 800^th birthday of Jalaluddin Rumi at a shrine presided over by President Musharraf’s personal Sufi mentor.

The Governor is a rather grand figure, appointed by the President. He does not receive reports of insurance commissions, like an American governor. As representative of the President (and Chief of Army Staff), Orakzai oversaw a provincial government at least nominally led by a chief minister chosen by the legislative assembly. Furthermore, as representative of the Federal Government, he directed the administrative apparatus of FATA, overseeing the work of all political agents and the Frontier Corps. General Orakzai, himself a native of Kurram Agency, had taken an active role in FATA – he had conceived and negotiated the peace agreement in North Waziristan a few months earlier. The government claimed that the agreement was solely with tribal elders, though the Urdu text of the agreement defined the parties as including Taliban and mujahidin as well, thereby recognizing the war against the Kabul government as a jihad. Gen. Orakzai was unable to put his hands on the text of the agreement at our meeting, but fortunately someone had faxed me one from Islamabad earlier.

The entry into Governor’s House, Peshawar, offers no hint that it belongs to a “Republic,” Islamic or otherwise. After waiting in an elaborate drawing room full of gilded furniture and regimental memorabilia, Ahmed and I walked with the Governor in his formal garden, among the peacocks, in order to work up an appetite for the “humble camp lunch” that we were promised, which included, as I recall, at least eight distinct courses (served to the three of us by liveried servants at a banquet table capacious enough for all the OBEs of Imperial India).

Between mouthfuls of chapli kabab and other Peshawari delicacies, we discussed the same matters as at the Peace Jirga, but from a quite different point of view. As the discussion was off the record, I cannot cite the Governor’s remarks, save to assure President Musharraf, that General Orakzai’s views in no way differed from those delivered by his superior at the Council on Foreign Relations two months earlier: the Taliban were or were in danger of becoming a Pashtun uprising against foreign occupation and a Tajik-dominated Kabul government. On the subject of integrating FATA with the Pakistani “mainstream,” Orakzai cited numerous difficulties and instead supported the policy of reaching peace agreements, supposedly to re-empower the “traditional tribal leadership.”

At that time and until February 18, Pakistani official spokesmen continued to market this branding of the situation in the Pashtun areas. One Pashtun member of the country’s military-bureaucratic establishment could barely conceal his contempt for the ANP over lunch at the Serena Hotel in Kabul, in October 2006. He depicted the ANP as a bunch of effete intellectuals distant from the people (the equivalent of “latte drinkers”) who could not win even a single constituency in NWFP (especially when the elections were rigged to prevent their doing so).

This year, however, despite massive pre-poll rigging and terrorist attacks on their rallies, the ANP nonetheless swept the provincial and national assembly elections in NWFP. They will be coalition partners of the PPP and PML-N in the center and will form the provincial government of the NWFP with the PPP -- together the two parties hold 60 percent of the seats.

As long as he remains president, Musharraf will control the FATA ruling structure through the NWFP governor, but the signs of his power are waning. The new chief of army staff, General Ashfaq Kayani, has used his independence of Musharraf in favor of fair elections. He withdrew army officers from civil functions in the week before the elections, preventing implementation of the usual pattern of rigging on polling day. (Some technical changes made by the election commission and a broad-based citizens’ monitoring effort also made rigging more difficult). Thus far Kayani has not demanded to participate in the political negotiations over formation of a new government, as did his predecessors.

It is less than a month until Nawruz 1387/2008, six years after Afrasiab Khattak and I flew together from Islamabad to Kabul. I don’t know yet if Afrasiab will be Chief Minister of the NWFP or a minister in the Federal cabinet. He now must be one of the top terrorist targets in Pakistan, if not the world. But this spring he and his colleagues will try to use their popular mandate to gain control of their own land, which is now used as a base not only to attack the government of Afghanistan and the democratic forces in Pakistan, but as the logistics and support center for al-Qaida’s global operations.

Difficult as it may be for some in Washington to understand, the most sincere and potentially effective allies the US has in Pakistan are secular, non-violent opponents of military rule, not the generals in Islamabad. The generals were willing to send troops to and drop bombs on FATA. But the ANP and its allies are willing to mobilize the people of the area to try to take back control of their own land, something a military regime neither would nor could do. As the Taliban and al-Qaida launch their spring operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the political challenge to control of their base areas is their greatest vulnerability. Is the Bush administration capable of exploiting it?

Read more on this article...

Half of Pakistanis believe Bhutto Killed by Government: Gallup Pakistan

Husain Haqqani of Boston University, a foreign affairs adviser to the late Benazir Bhutto, writes:

Below please find the first opinion poll, conducted by Gallup, since the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Several things stand out:

• First, that BB’s death has caused across-the-board grief that was not found after the deaths of her father and General Ziaul Haq.
• Second, that a majority of Pakistanis (53%) think the PPP’s decision to select Bilawal Bhutto Zardari as the party Co-Chairperson was correct.
• Third, that 48% of Pakistanis blame either government agencies or politicians linked to the government as responsible for the murder.
  

On most points the conventional wisdom of educated, elite Pakistanis that form the backbone of the US foreign policy community’s interaction with Pakistanis appears to be quite different from widely held public perceptions in Pakistan –a fact borne out by polling data in the past as well. Perhaps one of the many aspects of healing Pakistan is the need to bridge this divide between educated, professional, managerial, urban, well off Pakistan and the rest of the nation.

According to Gallup, “Nearly half of the sample suspected Government agencies (23%) and Government allied politicians (25%). Al-Qaeda or Taliban were suspected by 17%, while 16% suspected other external forces, principally the United States (12%) and India (4%). 19 % said they would not know.” If so many people mistrust their own government, how can that government be an effective US partner in fighting terrorism and winning hearts and minds against Jihadists?

Read Gallup Press Release here. Read more on this article...

Pakistan: The Art of Rigging (Updated with Description of New Security Measures)

Update: I previously summarized how post-poll election rigging has taken place in past elections in Pakistan and how, therefore, it might occur again. After my last post, based on an article in The Friday Times, I asked Staffan Darnolf, a Swedish electoral expert working with the Electoral Commission of Pakistan, to respond. He argues that new safeguards introduced for this election make the previous type of post-poll rigging impossible:

The one thing the people trying to rig the elections at the Assistant Commissioner offices have to overcome this time around is the uniquely numbered plastic security seal that prevents the new translucent ballot boxes’ slot from being opened without detection. Party agents, international observers and the 20,000 FAFEN [Free and Fair Election Network, a Pakistani election monitoring organization] observers have all been trained to record the unique serial numbers of the seals used on the ballot boxes in the polling stations, so they have to be prevented from entering the polling stations throughout the Election Day, which would defeat the alleged clandestine stealth-rigging at a select number of polling stations. Also, the party agents and observers at the Returning Officer office have been trained to record these serial numbers and will compare the numbers with the once recorded by their colleagues at the polling station level.

We have ordered 6.5 million seals to the ECP and every single seal has a unique number. The Presiding Officers have no way of knowing which seals will be used in their particular polling station until election day. So, unless each and every AC office has access to 6.5 million identical seals on their premises and can go through every single box and find these unique 30 seals it cannot be done. Also, logistically, someone need to order 1,768,000 million seals on the international market, have it shipped to Pakistan, and then park a couple of sea containers on each premise of the AC just to store the 6.5 million seals. In addition, you probably need to have a couple of hundred workers in each location to find those seals. All this without anyone spilling the beans. I find this non-plausible.

The original post follows:

Pakistani journalist Raheel Asghar Ginai published a complete guide to the "Art of Rigging" in The Friday Times (behind subscription firewall) on December 28, the day after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. The method described is exactly the one I was discussing in previous posts, but the account is more detailed. The description is accompanied with an arithmetical illustration from the 1990 election, where I first encountered this system.

Ginai shows that the overall results can be decisively changed by rigging only a few well chosen polling places in a few key constituencies and that the visible part of the polling and vote counting can be done in a completely legal and transparent fashion. Here is the system:

Methodology of Rigging on Election Day

The technique followed on the day of elections is very simple, but foolproof, and comprises the following steps:

l Political parties to be defeated and to be elected are identified

l Seats that are sure to be won by opposition candidates with clear margins are not touched. Fair elections are held in their constituencies

l Similarly, seats in which opposition candidates lose elections with large differences are also not chosen for rigging

l Only those constituencies are chosen where a close fight is expected and the difference of a few thousand votes can swing the results

l A normal constituency consists of about 250 polling stations. Out of about 250 polling stations, hardly 25 to 30 polling stations are chosen for rigging. The remaining polling stations are not touched at all. Fair elections are held in these polling stations as well

l No interference is carried out during polling at any station. Even at the twenty to thirty polling stations designated for rigging, nothing is done till polling is over. As a result, voters observe no rigging anywhere.

l The presiding officers of the chosen 20 to 30 polling stations are appointed by the approval of the intelligence services. They are trustworthy and ‘reliable’.

l Police personnel posted at all polling stations are instructed to obtain a copy of the result from the presiding officers at the end of counting of votes. These results are compiled unofficially at secretly established offices (mostly offices of Assistant Commissioners) to determine how many votes are required to make a defeated candidate win the elections.

l The selected presiding officers now play their pivotal role. They do not pass on a copy of the result to the polling agents of contesting candidates who are threatened by the police to leave the polling stations and disappear without contacting their candidate till the announcement of the result for that particular constituency. Tactics like threats of involving them in murder cases, drug trafficking etc. are used against the polling agents.

l The presiding officers of the chosen polling stations, instead of going to the returning officers at the end of polling, take their record to the secret offices mentioned above. Assistant Commissioners, who have the statistics of the results obtained by the police, cast the required number of votes in favour of the government candidate to make him win.

l The presiding officers then take the modified record of their polling stations to the returning officers, who declare the results according to the figures presented to them by the presiding officers.

l Obviously, the results of such polling stations reach the returning officers with delay, and perhaps are the last to be received. Before arrival of their results, the counting by the returning officers show opposition candidates in the lead. Their supporters start celebrating victory. But the tables are turned by the rigged results of the chosen polling stations towards the end of counting.

l To avoid detection of rigging, polling station–wise progressive results are not released to the media during counting of votes step by step as they are received. Only the final result of the constituency is announced. Only in the 1971 elections, polling station-wise progressive results were made public during counting, because the government did not intend to rig those elections.

With this methodology, voters and observers alike observe no rigging at all throughout the polling day. Changing results by a very small percentage at a very few places produces the desired results against the will of the people and an unpopular government is placed in power ....

Using figures from the 1990 elections, Ginai shows how rigging only 2.84% of the votes could account for the shift of 47 seats from the PPP to the Islami Jamhuri Ittihad, which he characterized as "a creation of the intelligence agencies." This shift made the difference between a PPP government and an IJI government. Today the PML-Q plays the role that the IJI did in 1990.

Ginai offers useful advice for poll watchers and election observers on election day:

Political parties, contesting candidates, the media, and international observers and the voters have to be made aware of this methodology of rigging. The movement of each presiding officer will have to be monitored on the evening of Election Day, till the result of his polling station is released to the media, and the presiding officer reaches the office of the returning officer. Polling station-wise results must be released to the public and private TV and radio channels progressively. Inquiries must be made into results of polling stations that arrive with abnormal delay to the returning officers. Candidates should make attendance of all of their polling agents of all polling stations compulsory at a prescribed point in the evening of the polling day. Any missing polling agent must be traced and questioned in privacy.

Normally, the media and international observers try to observe the polling process at various polling stations. But as rigging is not done during the day, it remains undetected. At the most they will point out some instances of pre-poll rigging, which is rampant these days. People at large form their opinion about the fairness of elections by observing order and discipline at the polling stations. They will, thus, be satisfied, as nothing untoward will be observed at any polling station, and it will never come to light how the will of the people was robbed with the secret casting of just four fake votes per thousand by the district administrations.

Note on Asif Zardari's sarcastic name for PML-Q. I have seen several reports that Asif Ali Zardari has called the PML-Q a "killer" party. This is an untranslatable play on words. PML-Q stands for Pakistan Muslim League -- Quaid-i-Azam. This distinguishes it from the PML-- Nawaz, the offshoot (or original) headed by Nawaz Sharif. Quaid-i-Azam is the quaint olde transliteration of Qa'id-i-A'zam, or Great Leader, the title bestowed on Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan and President of the original Muslim League. (Qa'id is the same Arabic word that entered Spanish as "El Cid," or "alcalde," the Spanish word for "mayor.")

The word for "killer" used by Zardari is "qatil," which starts with the same Arabic letter, qaf, as qa'id. So what he is saying is that the PML-Q is actually the PML-Qatil. Read more on this article...

More on Election Rigging in Pakistan

UPDATE: I have posted a scanned copy of the PPP's report on election rigging, Another Stain on the Face of Democracy. According to the sub-title, this report is only about pre-poll rigging. This is apparently the report that Benazir Bhutto was planning to give to a visiting U.S. Congressional delegation the evening that she was murdered. See below.

The summary is as follows:

The Master Plan of Rigging 2008 Elections Unveiled

The administration has planned to rig the Elections in the following manner:

1. Where an opposing candidate is strong in an area, they have planned to create a conflict at the polling station, even killing people if necessary, to stop polls for at least 3 - 4 hours. The polling stations will be granted extended opening of thirty minutes which will not be made up for the time lost.
2. Where they collect and secure the ballot box at the end of the polling day, the place will be broken into and ballots will not be stolen but thrown on the floor so they will have solid basis to call for a re-count during which process they will add the votes for their candidates.
3. 90 percent of the equipment that the USA gave the government of Pakistan to fight terrorism is being used to monitor and to keep a check on their political opponents especially the PPP. All of our communications as well as that of other major leaders in other parties are compromised by them. They listen to our conversations up to a mile away and intercept our communications.
4. The regime has asked government-sponsored candidates to give names of their security guards and local thugs to enroll them into the police for three days on election duty. These also include ex-Army personnel. They will be used to fire at voter's stations and drive voters away so that ballots can be stuffed.
5. Election officials are still being changed/transferred.
6. Military Intelligence sits in the offices of returning officers, police officials and other elections officials.
7. Election agents with voters' lists are being asked to give tampered lists to presiding officers.
8. Election being stitched up.
   

The version I have is only 47 pages long, whereas press reports speak of 160 pages. It appears on quick reading to argue that Military Intelligence, rather than the ISI, is the agency responsible for assuring that the election is rigged. I will post more as I receive it.

Original Post:

From now until February 18, when the general elections in Pakistan are scheduled, we will hear a lot about election rigging. I have written about it here and here and also discussed it with Scott Horton of Harpers. I would now like to present some more material, including my correspondence with Staffan Darnolf, a Swedish electoral specialist who has been working with the Electoral Commission of Pakistan for over a year. I was delayed in posting this, as I was waiting for consent from Darnolf in Islamabad, who just gave his approval, remarking, "Just had our fourth power cut today, so sorry for the late reply."

First, general background: Professor Rasul Bakhsh Rais of Lahore University of Management Sciences has written a paper called "Pakistan Elections: Troubled Legacy," a summary of which appeared in The News (Lahore). I will ask Rasul (whose office was next to mine at Columbia University many years ago) for a full copy of the paper and try to make it available. On December 5, the government filed charges against four professors of LUMS, including Rasul, as well as two students,under the Maintenance of Public Order Act, for some act of protest against Emergency rule and dismissal of the Supreme Court. As far as I know, however, the authorities have not gotten around to actually arresting them, as they are preoccupied with other matters. Here is the core of what Professor Rais has to say:

There is lot of evidence to support the allegations that elections have rarely been free or fair in the history of Pakistan except the 1970 [elections]. No elections ever since have been acclaimed as fair and its outcome accepted without doubts and reservations. However the intensity of the claim, as to how the elections were rigged, to what extent, and to favour whom have varied from elections to elections in Pakistan. The question why the outcome of elections has been contested, leads to the second characteristic of the Pakistani elections, the mistrust of the electoral machinery of the country. The Election Commission of Pakistan.

It is because the Commission has failed to cultivate impartiality and trust the two values that would be necessary to make any electoral exercise as successful. This begs another question; have the regimes in power used the electoral machinery to produce results to suit their interests? The answer to this question leads to the third feature of the Pakistani elections-partiality of the executive branch of the government. Interestingly, seven out of eight general elections since 1970 have been conducted either by a military regime directly or by an interim government that it created under its supervision. Therein lies the real dilemma of Pakistan's electoral politics-the civil military relations in Pakistan. The military in Pakistan has its own vision of good politics, good society, good economy and good democracy. It doesn't trust the politicians, nor does it believe that they are genuine representatives of the people of Pakistan. All the military leaders who captured power have viewed free play of democratic forces as dangerous, anti-development, and pregnant with the potential of degenerating to lawlessness and anarchy. In military-dominated or military-directed political system, the electoral process loses its credibility, as it seen by the public as an exercise to bring into power the most favoured groups and route out those opposed to its interventions. The real value of the electoral process lies in facilitating a representative government, and not in being an instrument of political manipulation. Unfortunately, the later expression is true of the way elections have been conducted in Pakistan. It is widely alleged and believed that through its intelligence agencies the military in the shadows or over the horizon has attempted to change the loyalties of politicians, has funded political campaigns of the favourite groups, and has used the Election Commission to change electoral results selectively, if not wholly. [emphasis added.] With low trust in the electoral process and frequent allegations of defrauding the opposition of its true electoral representation, the voter turn out in Pakistani elections has declined. It is also a reflection of distrust of the political class in Pakistan.

Next, recent events: Both the Guardian and the Times of London have reported that, the evening of her assassination, Benazir Bhutto was to present to visiting U.S. Senators and Congressional representatives a report on preparations being made to rig the elections. Declan Walsh of the Guardian:

Bhutto had obtained details of an Islamabad safe house run by the country's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency from where it intended to manipulate the poll, said Sarfraz Khan Lashari, an official on her party's 10-member election monitoring cell. The ISI-led operation would rig the vote in favour of President Pervez Musharraf's Pakistan Muslim League-Q party through ballot stuffing in constituencies across Sindh and Punjab provinces, he said. The ISI has a long history of meddling with elections in Pakistan, usually in the interest of the country's military establishment.

In 1990 the ISI received 140m rupees (£1.1m at current values) to rig national elections, according to supreme court testimony by the then chief of army staff, General Mirza Aslam Beg.

There is no ISI spokesman but a government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, denied the claims. "How can you run an election rigging campaign from a safe house? There is a lot of talk about the ISI but not much substance," he said.

The PPP claims to have identified the safe house, the location of which is given in a smaller document "of much greater sensitivity." According to Jeremy Page for the Times:

The second report, which Ms Bhutto did not plan to release to the media, alleged that the ISI was using some of the $10 billion (£5 billion) in US military aid that Pakistan has received since 2001 to run a covert election operation from a safe house in G5, a central district of Islamabad, he said.

“The report was done by some people who we’ve got in the services. They directly dealt with Benazir Bhutto,” [Lashari] continued, adding that Ms Bhutto was planning to share the contents of the report with the British Ambassador as well as the US lawmakers.

Finally, my discussion with Staffan Darnolf. In his first note, Darnolf wrote:

It was with great interest that I read your interview in Harper’s Magazine. Since working on the Afghanistan elections back in 2004 & 2005, I have always tried to read your work and commentaries. For the last 15 months I have now been working with the ECP [Electoral Commission of Pakistan] here in Pakistan.

I am the first to recognize that the electoral process in Pakistan leaves much to be desired. This includes the method for allocating voters to polling stations, ECP's interaction with political parties and the aggregation of results. In order to achieve the necessary improvements I am of the opinion that we must accurately present the problems.

In this article you mentioned that the elections are likely to be rigged with the assistance of ISI and district administration as “[t]hese ballots, already printed, filled out, and prepared, are then added to those transported from polling places for the final count.” Could you elaborate a bit more here, as I simply don’t understand your argument. The reason being that no central counting of ballot papers take place. The ballot boxes are opened at the polling stations and the ballot papers are counted at the individual polling stations.

I responded:

The method of rigging that I described is sometimes called "ghost polling places." Nawaz Sharif was quoted in the NYT today.

[I erred, as the quotation was actually from Nawaz's brother, Shahbaz Sharif, reported by Jane Perlez:

He [Shahbaz Sharif] accused the current chief minister of Punjab, Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, of planning to distribute forged ballot papers and to create “ghost” polling places in order to swing the election in favor of Mr. Musharraf’s party. “Ghost” polling places are extra polling places that are often created in Pakistani elections to enhance the vote totals of one side or another.]

I myself witnessed the ballot counting at the polling place in Sukkur in 1990. It was a model of the democratic process! Then the ballots are sealed with the total and sent to the division center or somewhere [the Returns Office for the constituency] for the totaling of all the polling places in the constituency. The polling places are forbidden to release their counts to the public. But they are monitored by the ISI elections cell. The elections cell checks the "real results" and then adds results from "ghost polling places" before the final count is announced in order to achieve the desired outcome. The ballots are prepared in advance for those constituencies where the ISI's pollling indicates it is necessary. (The desired result is not 99% for PML-Q, but the right balance of seats to leave the military firmly in control while making it look like a parliamentary system.) This produces some odd turnout figures unless real turnout is kept down, which is why the latter is important.

Darnolf replied:

The results aggregation process you are describing in your email might have been in place 17 years ago, but is no longer the case. Nowadays the ballots are counted at the polling station immediately following the end of polling. Party agents and observers are given a copy of the results form. The results forms, and other election material, are sent to the Returning Officer in-charge of the constituency in question, for aggregation. However, no physical counting is taking place at the RO-level. The RO will review the results forms and tally the results based on these documents. In accordance with the National Reconciliation Ordinance and ECP procedures, the aggregated results are shared with party agents and observers present at the Returning Officer premises. Unfortunately, observers and party agents have not always focused on this part of the process, or in some cases been refused access to the RO, which is of great concern to me.

In his final note, in response to my request for his permission to publish his views, he added:

What my argument boils down to is that this notion of ghost polling stations is a red herring. Why go through this huge exercise involving thousands of people to try to siphon off ballot papers, get your hands on ballot boxes, security seals, the right stamps, the original forms, prep the ballot papers and then have them sent to the Returning Officers' premises where no counting of the ballots are taking place? Also, how do you produce faked voters list for these ghost polling stations now when the voters lists are computerized and can be easily verified?

To me, this seems as far-fetched as the allegation by some political parties in late November and the first week of December stating that 108 Punjab NA constituencies had been selected for rigging, as the ruling party's representatives had already received 20-30K (the reported number varied) extra ballot papers for stuffing. The problem with this accusation is that candidate nomination only ended on Dec 15. And before that no one knows which parties and candidates will actually run for office. Hence, it is only on December 16th that the final design of the real ballots are known and they can be produced for any of the 849 directly elected constituencies.

I would be grateful for any further contributions to this discussion. Read more on this article...

Pakistan Election Rigging: Corrections and Clarifications

In response to my previous post, Pakistan's Power Puzzle, I received a note from a very knowledgeable international official working on electoral matters in Pakistan raising questions about some of my statements. I hope that tomorrow I will be able to publish his views. The official referred to two points I made, rigging elections through "ghost polling places" to obtain the desired result by adding forged ballots to those received by the returning officer, and an allegation that computers supplied by the U.S. to the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) were not plugged in.

I erred in stating that the computers in question were supplied by the U.S. My source (below) did not say who funded the computers. This report was circulated by a Pakistani colleague who accompanied it with some critical remarks about U.S. aid to the ECP, which I confused with the report itself. There is no reference to U.S. aid in my source (below). Also, the computers were plugged in but not turned on. My source was a Reuters report from Attock on December 25, 2007. Attock is the historical fortress town on the bend of the Indus River marking the boundary of Punjab and NWFP. At one time it was the frontier of the Mughal Empire with Afghanistan. It is about 80 km (50 miles) from Islamabad on a well-trafficked multi-lane highway:

ATTOCK: The Election Commission’s office in Attock is in a run-down building on the outskirts of town.

Several dusty computers sit on tables, none of them switched on, and the office has no internet connection [high-speed internet connections are widely available in Pakistan], said the only person there on Monday morning, a caretaker with a grey beard. “No one’s here,” said the caretaker, Ghulam Rafiq, when a Reuters reporter stopped by. Transparent plastic ballot boxes were stacked up with piles of election manuals in boxes.

“He comes very rarely,” Rafiq said when asked about the district’s main election officer. “He’s a man of his own will.” Pakistani opposition parties are pinning their hopes for free and fair parliamentary elections on Jan 8 on Election Commission offices like the one in Attock.

But in this town on the Indus River in Punjab province, opposition politicians said the commission was ignoring complaints of unfair electioneering by candidates who support President Pervez Musharraf.

“The election commission seems to be totally paralysed,” said Malik Amin Aslam, a former environment minister running as an independent candidate. “We are providing them information with proof,” he said of his complaints about unfair electioneering by his opponents.

“There’s no doubt there’s a plan to support certain politicians and parties.” Three members of a powerful political family that supports Musharraf are contesting in Attock’s three constituencies.

The father of one of the candidates is the district government chief who is meant to be impartial but on Monday was seen asking voters to support the three. His photograph appears on his daughter’s election posters.

“Voters are being openly threatened and they are changing their loyalties but the election commission is paying no attention. They are part of this rigging plan,” said Sheikh Aftab Ahmed, a candidate for PML-N party. But Attock’s assistant election commissioner, Sardar Mazhar Hussain, tracked down at a town court, said his office had not got any complaints in writing so there was nothing he could do.

“There’s no question of taking action against anybody.” Attock’s chief election commission official, district returning officer Tariq Abbasi, said his office could do much more if it had the resources and workers.

On post-polling rigging, my correspondent argued that some additional safeguards had been introduced. I hope to publish his description tomorrow and seek comments from others.

Meanwhile, I have located online the National Democratic Institute's Report of the International Observer Delegation to the Pakistan Elections in October 1990. Unfortunately the file is posted in a nearly illegible (pre-PDF) format. It includes the report I drafted of my experiences on election day in Sukkur, Sindh, together with my colleague, Senegalese journalist Boubacar Toure. (Toure and I were surprised to find among the disenfranchised PPP supporters in rural Sindh a man of unmistakably African appearance, perhaps a remnant of the Indian Ocean slave trade.) These experiences (only partly reproduced here) have left me with a persistent skepticism about elections in Pakistan:

Around 11:30 that night we went to try to find the DC [Division Commissioner] and see what happened elsewhere. Our car was unavailable, so we went out in the street and more or less stood there until a passing motorist picked us up. He took us to the home of the commissioner of Sukkur division, where we found the Commissioner, Deputy Commissioner Kamran Lashari, and a commander of the police rangers.

Lashari asked us how our day had gone. We told him what we had seen [several incidents of violence, booth capturing, intimidation] and said he was surprised. He was under the impression that order had been restored in Ghotki, and he did not realize that the polling agents had been kidnapped. We gave him the written Urdu statement to read.

The three officers present were receiving telephone calls giving them information on the law and order situation (which was now generally calm) and on the election returns. They told us what they were hearing. While we unfortunately did not take notes on these results (which we imagined were definitive), we later compared our recollection of these events, and we are in agreement that we remember hearing the following two statements:

1. The PPP had carried all three seats in Sukkur district. This includes NA 153, where the son of Pir Pagara [a large landowner from a Sufi family aligned with the government], Sadruddin Shah, was running against the PPP.

2. Asif Ali Zardari [PPP candidate, husband of Benazir Bhutto] had defeated Murtaza Jatoi [son of caretaker Prime Minister Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi] in Nawabshah.

The next day in Karachi we were surprised to read in the newspapers that Murtaza Jatoi had been declared the winner in Nawabshah by the Election Commission in Islamabad. We were also surprised to hear from Jam Sadiq Ali [Chief Minister of Sindh] that the son of Pir Pagara had won in NA 153.

For those not familiar with this cast of characters, Jam Sadiq Ali was thus memorialized by Dawn columnist Ardeshir Cowasjee:

Blackguard, murderer, grand larcenist (he died before he could be convicted). He was a likeable rogue, who never denied the fact that he was a rogue.

Despite all his attributes, he was chosen to be the chief minister of Sindh by President Ghulam Ishaq Khan to serve his nefarious purposes. GIK wished to remain in power for eternity. Jam as CM robbed and plundered again - as he had done during Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's regime. But this time around he did not kill. Cancer killed him.

He left a very charming Hindu wife, lots of offspring, and lots and lots of moolah.

The internet includes some helpful descriptions of how Jam Sadiq Ali carried out his job.

This just in: a Report on Pakistan from the International Crisis Group:

Islamabad/Brussels, 2 January 2008: If Pakistan is to be stable in the wake of Benazir Bhutto’'s murder, President Pervez Musharraf must resign and a quick transition follow to a democratically elected civilian government.

After Bhutto’'s Murder: A Way Forward for Pakistan, the latest briefing from the International Crisis Group, concludes that Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 coup, is no longer, if he ever was, a factor for stability. Particularly the U.S. must recognise he is a serious liability, seen as complicit in the death of the popular politician. Unless he steps down, tensions will worsen and the international community could face the nightmare of a nuclear-armed, Muslim country descending into civil war from which extremists would stand to gain.

“Bhutto’s death has drawn the battle lines even more clearly between Musharraf’'s military-backed regime and Pakistan’s moderate majority, which will settle for nothing less than genuine parliamentary democracy”, says Mark Schneider, Crisis Group'’s Senior Vice-President.

Crisis Group agrees with the Election Commission decision to postpone the parliamentary election scheduled for 8 January to 18 February – but only if additional steps are taken so that the delay contributes to the creation of conditions for free and fair elections and the restoration of democracy.

These include, in addition to Musharraf’'s resignation: appointment, in consultation with the political parties, of caretaker governments at federal and provincial levels; full restoration of the constitution; and restoration of judicial independence, including reappointment of the judges Musharraf dismissed because they would not do his bidding in November when he declared martial law. The international community should also support an independent, fixed-deadline investigation into Bhutto’s murder.

“It is time to recognise that democracy, not an artificially propped-up, defrocked, widely despised general – has the best chance to provide stability and turn back extremists’ gains”, says Robert Templer, Crisis Group’s Asia Program Director.

Read more on this article...

Pakistan's Power Puzzle (With Corrections from Comments)

The Pakistan Electoral Commission's decision to postpone the elections scheduled for January 8 because of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto could be justified on technical grounds, but few people in Pakistan will believe the decision was made on technical grounds. Under current conditions in Pakistan, which are worse that most U.S. reporting indicates, it is impossible to hold a free and fair election. But there is little indication that the government ever intended to hold a free and fair election, even when it could have.

I called a friend in Lahore this morning. The obstacles are not just that electoral materials (possibly including those prepared for rigging) were destroyed in the rioting. The country's infrastructure is under severe stress. In Lahore there are only 7 hours of electricity a day, and water pressure is also reported to be unreliable (I know those of you in Kabul may not feel their pain). Optic fiber lines were cut in Sindh, blacking out telecommunications for a while. The front page of Dawn online yields the following: There has been massive damage to the country's rail network. Fuel is in short supply, and the shortages are likely to get worse. The stock market and the currency are both crashing. Government ministers are charging "foreign elements" (i.e. India) with organizing the riots, a useful excuse for martial law.

In Pakistan there is a massive outburst of rage against Musharraf and everything associated with his government, including the government's claim that it has evidence that the Pakistani Taliban, led by Baitullah Mahsud, carried out the assassination. I still lean toward the hypothesis that the operation was carried out by organizations connected to al-Qaida. Given the relationship of the Pakistani military to jihadi organizations that by no means absolves the Musharraf regime of responsibility.

But what recent events demonstrate even more clearly is that the Bush administration's policy of relying on a personal relationship with a megalomaniac manipulator like Musharraf to fight al-Qaida has strengthened that organization immeasurably and perhaps fatally damaged the U.S.'s ability to form the coalition it needs to isolate and destroy that organization.

Many, probably most or nearly all, Pakistanis don't see the "War on Terror" as struggle of "moderates" against "extremists." They see it as a slogan to legitimate the military's authoritarian control . Through the classic psychological mechanism of reducing cognitive dissonance, it is only a short jump from believing that the threat of al-Qaida is being manipulated to strengthen authoritarian rule, to believing that the threat of al-Qaida is a hoax perpetrated to strengthen authoritarian rule. A similar mechanism of reducing cognitive dissonance has led many Americans to accept propaganda that the "anti-American" Saddam Hussein and the "anti-American" Islamic Republic of Iran" must be allied with the "anti-American" al-Qaida. (Before some member of the nutosphere calls me out for using quotation remarks around "anti-American," let me stipulate that the purpose of the quotation marks is to call attention to the fact that every organization that opposes the U.S. is not defined solely or even primarily by that opposition. It is not to claim that these entities are in fact "pro-American.")

The Bush administration's terrible simplification has not only harmed U.S. security interests; it has also done perhaps irreparable damage to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Some readers protest when I lead with the implications of such events for U.S. foreign policy, as if I didn't think it worthwhile to mention the effects on those directly concerned. Believe me, I understand that Afghanistan, Pakistan, and all those other countries out there have purposes other than playing a role in scripts drafted in Washington.

But I am an American writing for a primarily American audience. I don't think that Pakistanis are looking to me to explain their country to them. I am trying to use my experience and expertise, such as it is, to convince my compatriots, our allies, and the international organizations to which we belong, to change their relationships with other countries. Sometimes I appear on the media here (the US) or speak to non-specialist audiences. They always ask me to explain the implications for them.

There is a connection, however, between the foreign policy interests of the U.S. and the direct effect on, in this case, Pakistan. That is because the script writers in Washington impose their own terrible simplifications on the people whose behavior they are trying to affect, without understanding who those people are and what they want, often with disastrous consequences.

The current situation in Pakistan is a case in point. The Bush administration has decided that in the "Muslim world" a battle is going on between pro-American "moderates" and anti-American "extremists." According to them, the "Muslim world" has a two-party system organized around how Muslims feel about America. In Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf is a "pro-American moderate." Benazir Bhutto is a "pro-American moderate." Therefore it is only logical (and in U.S. interests!) for the U.S. to realign Pakistan politics so that the "moderates" work together against the "extremists."

This ignores a few problems. It is not just a random problem that the "pro-American moderate" institution headed by General Musharraf executed Benazir's father and held her for years in solitary confinement. Despite Musharraf's propagation of the PR slogan, "enlightened moderation," the institution that he headed, and which put him in power, supported the Taliban unstintingly for many years and failed to deliver any results against al-Qaida when it would really have counted. This is the same institution that massacred hundreds of thousands of its own countrymen in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).

The administration's plan for Pakistan was based on a model of transition from authoritarianism that took place in several Latin American countries, which is known as a "pacted transition." (If you want to know more about it, Google "transitology.") The basic idea is that the "moderates" in the bureaucratic authoritarian regime and the "moderates" in the democratic opposition negotiate a peaceful process of extrication of the military from power through elections, which may initially be "guided" rather than "free and fair." Of course the administration seem to have neglected one of the research's main findings: pacted transitions give rise to "democracies with birth defects." Among those birth defects are continued control by the military over key areas of policy and the limited consolidation of democracy. Much depends on what the leaders of the military are actually trying to accomplish.

This already happened in Pakistan. In 1988 General Zia-ul-Haq's hand-picked Prime Minister, Muhammad Khan Junejo, got in several conflicts with Zia over Afghanistan (the negotiation of the Geneva Accords and the explosion of weapons destined for the Afghan muijahidin at an ISI warehouse in Rawalpindi). After the as yet unsolved Case of the Exploding Mangoes, which killed General Zia, ISI Director General Akhtar Abdul Rahman, and U.S. Ambassador Arnie Raphel, the military dismissed Junejo and agreed to a reasonably free election, which was won by Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party. After the death of General Zia, whom Bhutto and many Pakistanis held responsible for her father's death, she was able to return.

But her electoral victory did not settle the issue. Bhutto first had to negotiate with the military and agree not to remove military authority over security issues, notably Afghanistan, the nuclear program, Kashmir, and senior military appointments. After the failed attempt by the ISI with U.S. backing to orchestrate the conquest of the Afghan city of Jalalabad in March 1989 (using not only Afghan mujahidin but also al-Qaida), Bhutto sacked ISI director General Hamid Gul. Other conflicts with the military ensued. As a result, the military had President Ghulam Ishaq Khan remove her on corruption charges in August 1990. The military and bureaucracy rigged the elections in October 1990 so that she would be defeated by Nawaz Sharif.

I will come back to the election rigging, because the government used the same technique that it was apparently planning to employ this time as well, namely the establishment of "ghost polling places" to return fake ballots in key constituencies identified by the ISI's Electoral Cell. This method of rigging is not visible to foreign election observers.

When Nawaz Sharif in turn became too independent, it was his turn to be sacked. This was followed by two rounds of alternance determined by the military (Bhutto in 1994, Sharif in 1996). The final confrontation between Nawaz Sharif and General Musharraf was provoked again by a struggle over the military's prerogatives. Sharif charged that Musharraf organized the Kargil campaign in Kashmir on his own initiative, while Sharif was pursuing negotiations with the U.S. over Bin Laden behind Musharraf's back.

The leaders of the Pakistan military, of which Musharraf is a typical example, do not see themselves primarily as "pro-American moderates" battling with "anti-American extremists." They see themselves as responsible for building a powerful militarized state in Pakistan representing the heritage of Islamic empires in South and Central Asia against the threat from India and the selfish maneuvers of politicians (not necessarily in that order). In the course of doing so, they have enriched themselves and gained control of much of the economy and civilian administration. The military has always aspired to control the judiciary as well, and Musharraf has now restored to that institution the supine illegitimacy that it possessed under General Zia. This means of course that the use of institutional power for private gain by the military is legal (as the judiciary has no power over the military), while similar use of institutional power by civilians is "corruption."

The military allies with the U.S. because that is the only way to get the weapons and money for their national security project and to prevent the U.S. from aligning with India. It has nothing to do with "moderation." The "pro-American moderate" Pakistan military has used the "anti-American extremist" jihadis for its national security project. (By the way, the Afghan Taliban were not originally anti-American. In 1997, Wakil Ahmad Mutawakkil, who later became foreign minister, told a meeting I was chairing at Columbia University that the Taliban would help the U.S. "in its struggle against international terrorism," and nobody wanted to build the Unocal pipeline more than they did.)

The goal of the Pakistan military has been neither moderation nor extremism as defined in Washington. Its goal has been to stay in power in order to pursue its national security project, which is also in its institutional interest and the private interest of its members. So why did Musharraf enter into negotiations with Bhutto? As Chief of Army Staff, Musharraf occupied a role similar to that of head of the ruling party in a one-party dominant system. His party, the military, unlike the other parties, is a disciplined cadre organization which, along with its fellow travelers (civilian allies of the military) controls all the key levers of power, including the civil administration and the judiciary. Such control is, it believes, required by the national interest. Musharraf added to this an economic policy under the guidance of his Prime Minister, former Citibank official Shaukat Aziz, that has indeed succeeded to some extent. In fact it helped create the middle class and new communications media that are leading the fight to oust Musharraf.

In order to maintain the essential base of his party's control (U.S. weapons and money) after 9/11, Musharraf had to abandon the military's historic political alliance with the religious right and its allied militants.But Pakistan is not a "banana republic," i.e. a tiny country with a single cohesive landowning elite that can run a dictatorship informally through intimidation, violence, and patronage (though these have a role to play). It is a country of 160 million with one of the largest cities in the world (Karachi) and a well-developed middle class. Running such a country requires a higher degree of institutionalization and political legitimation. Hence Musharraf needed new political allies to run institutions.

But he did not want political allies to negotiate a transition to democracy: he wanted political allies to legitimate continued military rule. The Islamist parties were willing to partner with the military on that basis, because it was their only way of acceding to power. But the PPP and the PML-N (Nawaz Sharif's party) could actually win elections. While the military tried to use Washington's interest in an alliance of "moderates" to legitimate its own rule, it could not allow a party that actually aspired to rule to come to power. Enter the PML-Q (Musharraf's party, aka the King's Party). The military assembled this party out of notables of various sorts to represent those civilian allies that supported military rule. This description does not apply to every official of the PML-Q (some of whom are friends of mine), who joined for different reasons. Some, in particular, supported the relatively successful economic policies of Shaukat Aziz. But the party exists basically in order to win elections rigged by the military.

Benazir Bhutto, however, probably imagined that the opening provided by the U.S. pressure on Musharraf for a "moderate" alliance (to legitimate Musharraf's power for the sake of the "War on Terror," not democracy) might provide her with an opening she could exploit to regain power. I will not attempt to judge among the various claims about Bhutto -- from heroine of democracy to power-hungry corrupt feudal. I will just note that she knew she was risking her life and did not need to do so. When President Karzai met her the morning of her death, she told the Afghans she feared she would be assassinated soon. She represented the hopes of millions of people. To represent them, she would have had to challenge the military's power. Nor did she take the easy populist route (seemingly chosen by Nawaz Sharif) of belittling the threat of the militants. Though what she said about the militants pleased Washington, many things she said about General Musharraf did not. I believe that events will tragically show that she was right.

Her strategy appeared to be to exploit the military's weakness and the support of the U.S. to enlarge the space for her party's power, and therefore, in the flawed sense this word has in the real world, of democracy. (The family inheritance of leadership has a rational function too: without it, there is a good chance that the PPP would tear itself apart in factional struggles. It still might do so, but the appointment of her son as heir and her husband as regent has provided some breathing space.)

But Musharraf was not going to let her win. On December 11 Dawn published a story purportedly announcing the "official poll results" nearly a month before the scheduled elections. The PML-Q was to win the most seats, with the PPP second and PML-N third. The numbers were chosen in such a way that the Islamist parties that supported the Afghan Taliban, the military's old partners, would have few seats but enough to hold the balance of power.

How to get such results? The ISI has an electoral cell that, among other things, conducts polling. (A friend who is familiar with the operation claims that the polling is not reliable and tends to be driven by the desired outcome.) The purpose is not to win a referendum with 99% of the vote, but to get a balance that leaves the military in charge through its political allies. This does not require rigging every constituency, but controlling the media and administration to create a positive environment for the military's allies, and then rigging only a few dozen constituencies where the outcome is nonetheless in doubt (plus constituencies of key leaders). The principal technique is the printing of more ballots than are needed and the establishment of "ghost polling places" in the constituencies that are to be rigged. The excess ballots are filled out for the desired candidates and placed in "ballot boxes" belonging to the ghost polling places. The ballot boxes and their fictitious totals are forwarded to the returning officer together with the legitimate ballots. The system needs only to approximate its target to achieve the desired political results.

The PPP now wants to capitalize on the public's anger and sympathy. The time that the electoral commission could use to reconstitute the infrastructure for a free and fair election is also time that could be used to reconstitute the infrastructure for rigging. Hence the PPP probably sees no good reason to allow the electoral apparatus to reconstitute itself.

A genuine free election in Pakistan today could very well confront President Musharraf with a parliament that would not recognize him and that would openly challenge the power of the army. But the military no longer has the capacity or legitimacy to rule Pakistan. The time for a pacted transition is past. The choice before Pakistan is democracy or disintegration.

In a further post I will discuss hypotheses about responsibility for Bhutto's assassination and the relationship of the Pakistan army to the jihadi militants.

UPDATES: Ahmed Rashid has published an incisive analysis from Pakistan in Yale Global Online. He writes:

In the aftermath of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan faces the gravest threat to its unity since the country was born amid bloodshed 60 years earlier.

Although the security of the whole world is at stake from the way power is transferred in this nuclear weapon state, world leaders can do little but look on helplessly as Pakistan’s cowed political establishment and dispirited military face the threat of a determined Al Qaeda–backed Islamic extremists. While enormous public anger and mistrust swells in the nuclear-armed nation, both President Pervez Musharraf and his leading backer, the US, have lost all credibility over managing free and democratic elections, combating extremism or delivering stability to the troubled region.

Read the rest.

Pajhwok Afghan News interviews former Afghan Interior Minister, Ali Ahmad Jalali, on the regional impact of Benazir Bhutto's assassination. Excerpt:

Benazir Bhutto's loss is devastating not only for Pakistan but also for a region that suffers from instability and violence fueled by religious extremism and militancy. Bhutto was strongly committed to fight the threat in her country through restoration of democracy that could foster the empowerment of moderate forces. Bhutto's death, therefore, is a serious blow to democracy and moderation in Pakistan with rippling impact in the region and beyond.

The use of religious militancy as an instrument of foreign policy by Pakistani military regimes in the recent past has helped the rise of extremism and entrenchment of trans-national terrorist groups in Pakistan. Talibanization of Pakistani tribal areas is a dangerous outcome of the ill-fated policy. Further, Pakistan has gradually become a center of the al-Qaeda web that radiated out to the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. I hope the tragic loss of Bhutto will finally strengthen the determination of Pakistan government to act decisively against the militants and enlist the political weight of moderate forces in the struggle through democratic changes.

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