I hate to say “no duh,” but seriously? No duh.
Fearful of violence and deterred by confusion at polling stations, Pakistanis voted Monday in parliamentary elections that may fail to produce clear winners and could result in protracted post-election political skirmishing.
A number of clashes among polling officials and voters resulted in 10 people killed and 70 injured, according to Pakistani television channels.
Voter turnout was low; in the North-West Frontier Province, which abuts the lawless tribal areas, turnout was only 20 percent, according to election officials. In Peshawar, the provincial capital, Islamic militants prevented many women from voting. Election officials estimated that only 523 of 6,431 registered female voters at six polling stations cast ballots.
In Lahore, the political capital of Punjab province, lines were thin, and many voters complained they could not find their names on the voting lists.
But as the polls closed at 5 p.m. local time, election officials said that nationwide voting had been relatively calm compared with past elections.
We’ll see how big a margin Musharraf wins by; meanwhile, will the right-o-sphere continue to sing Musharraf’s praises and blame the media for all the world’s woes? Sadly, no—Gateway Pundit just uses it as an opportunity to bash John Kerry while writing off all Muslims as murderous animals.
We’ll update things if there are any surprises.
Update: This might be one—contrary to Foreign Policy‘s endless droning about their latest online essay, it appears the opposition parties, which belong to Bhutto and Sharif, might squeeze out a victory. Of course, the proof is in the counted vote. We’ll remain alert to what happens.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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{ 7 comments }
Alright, let those who have not sinned, cast the first stone.
Please Mr. Foust — Did the Devil make you change the letter “a” in your last name to “o”? — name an alternative to Musharraf that the US should support in Pakistan? Bhutto was going to be the gal, but she got taken out predictably, so name someone better right now at this moment. There is no one. Would you rather have Musharraf gone and the Taliban running the country? That worked out well in Afghanistan.
You know, I’d like to see all the dictator types throughout the planet removed, but in some cases, what would replace them, would be disastrous, as we see with a thousand Saddams on the rampage in Iraq and a Shia theocratic-sharia law government.
As far as the Gateway Pundit and Islam, it’s important to separate Muslims from Political Islam and Islamists, who are antithetical to our Western concept of Democracy,
or more accurately a Representational Republic style of government, where minority rights are protected and you have true freedom of the press (no true freedom of the press when you can’t blaspheme Mohammed or the Quran), and other rights of Civil Liberty guaranteed (the loss of which accompanies the implementation of Sharia law).
While I want to strangle the Gateway Pundit about Iraq where he’s a complete Farking idiot, I think as regards to Islamic issues, he’s berating the Islamists and Political Islam, which endanger us greatly in the West, rather than your glaring generalization of all Muslims as murderers.
And eeeek Kosovo now, which is likely to serve as a Grand Central Station for further terrorist infiltration in to the Balkans and mightily piss the Russians off, of whom I can’t see not retaliating against the US in some way.
George Bush is our First Islamist president, said to say.
…
Did you just attempt a Goethe joke?
Back to the substance of your comment, the Taliban has no real sway in Pakistan. Every time radical Islam has been given a chance at the polls—in Pakistan but also in Turkey, and even Egypt—it loses. The FLN in Algeria in 1992 is the only example I know of where a radical Islamist party won an open election (HAMAS is another matter, as Fatah didn’t exactly allow real elections, and the West Bank is so unique it never really serves as a good case study).
Elsewhere, Pakistan has a good history of know what I mean?”>strongly rejecting Islamism when put to the vote. Musharraf’s claim of being anti-Islamist is a lie: he not only supports Islamists who wage guerilla campaigns in Kashmir (and, up until we threatened to bomb his Presidential palace after 9/11, Afghanistan as well), but some segments of his troops actively collude with Islamists to this day.
Pakistan’s democracy is sick, of that there’s no doubt. The people seem to have only three choices: Musharraf, the Bhutto clan, and the Sharif clan. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t still cycle between them. Musharraf has proven himself far more of a problem than a solution; whatever the result, even someone pathetic like Nawaz Sharif (or even some of the middlemen in the PPP) should be a preferred alternative.
Gateway Pundit’s methods amount to tracking crime committed only by blacks with the assumption that they’re more prone to violence and drug abuse than whites and asians. It is quite fundamentally racist.
Well, apparently democracy in Pakistan is well enough to deal a death blow to Musharraf. We’ll see what kind of sturm und drang comes this week. Ahem.
There is talk of a grand coalition between Bhutto’s Party and Sharif’s party. It might be good for these two bigshot parties to form a government for now, freezing out Musharraf’s bas and freezing out the Islamic fundamentalists. But I wonder how effective this coalition would be. Before Bhutto was killed, she and Sharif seemed to be analogous to Bangladesh’s Zia and Hasina: the same old same old. Bangladesh ultimately swepted Zia and Hasina aside. Maybe it’s time for Sharif to step aside himself.
Josh, you have my sympathies, predictions are hard–especially about the future…
Gateway Pundit’s methods amount to tracking crime committed only by blacks with the assumption that they’re more prone to violence and drug abuse than whites and asians. It is quite fundamentally racist.
Gateway Pundit’s methods amount to tracking crime committed only by blacks with the assumption that they’re more prone to violence and drug abuse than whites and asians. It is quite fundamentally racist.