Pakistanis deal a democratic blow to Musharraf

What happened

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf came under growing pressure to resign this week after his nation’s voters gave a landslide victory to two opposition parties in the parliamentary elections. Critics had raised concerns that Musharraf would try to rig the vote count, but Musharraf quickly indicated that he would abide by the results. “This is the voice of the nation,” Musharraf said. “Everyone should accept the results. That includes myself.” Musharraf himself remains in power, but former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, whose party was a big winner in the vote, said he would meet with leaders of other parties to decide whether to impeach Musharraf when the next parliament convenes. “He is completely finished,’’ retired Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, Pakistan’s former army chief, said about Musharraf. “It will be very embarrassing for him to stay on with a hostile parliament.” Musharraf, though, insisted he had no plans to resign.

Initial results showed that the Pakistan People’s Party, the party of assassinated opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, took 87 seats in the 342-seat National Assembly, while the other main opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim League–N, took 66. Musharraf’s party came in third with 39, while Islamist parties won just three seats. The opposition parties immediately began negotiating to form a coalition government, but since Bhutto’s death in December, neither has put forward a charismatic leader who would be the obvious choice for prime minister.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

What the editorials said

This victory for democracy proves that Bush was wrong to coddle Musharraf, said The New York Times. The administration justified its support for the authoritarian Musharraf by portraying him as the lesser of two evils. “Islamist extremists, we were told, would win any fair democratic fight,” and it was safer to tolerate a dictatorial president who fired Supreme Court justices and banned political rallies. But Pakistanis proved Bush wrong. “Even with a rigged system, the moderates managed to win.”

Actually, the outcome is “a vindication” of Bush’s approach, said The Wall Street Journal. “It was never in America’s interests to humiliate or isolate the Pakistani leader.” The preferred tactic, putting diplomatic pressure on him, worked: Musharraf accepted his party’s defeat gracefully. The U.S. had already begun reaching out to the Pakistani opposition, notably to Bhutto before she was assassinated. Now, Washington can “continue to transition” from “a Musharraf policy to a broader Pakistani one.”

What the columnists said

The Bush administration can’t spin its way out of this failure, said Juan Cole in Salon.com. “George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have built their war on terrorism on a close alliance with Musharraf.” Now, that cynical policy “has been dealt a severe, perhaps fatal, blow.” And good riddance. While the U.S. has lavished “billions of dollars in aid” on Musharraf, his security services have allowed Islamist militants to establish “a new militant Taliban movement” on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border. Meanwhile, “Osama bin Laden remains at large.”

Let’s not lose sight of the big picture, said Trudy Rubin in The Philadelphia Inquirer. The big losers in Pakistan this week were the Islamists. In the Northwest Frontier Province, which borders both Afghanistan’s and Pakistan’s tribal areas, the Islamists were trounced, and a secular party took control. This presents an opportunity for a “smarter American policy” that could actually lead to victory in the war on terror.

The parliamentary defeat of the Islamists is good news, but it’s not the whole story, said Nicholas Schmidle in Slate.com. Many religious voters failed to support the Islamist parties for the simple reason that those parties have failed to deliver the radical agenda they promised. Islamists have now abandoned politics and “shifted their allegiances to the militants.” Musharraf couldn’t get rid of the militants and it’s unlikely that a new, democratic government will do any better.

What next?

The two winning parties urged Musharraf to step down as president, noting that he had promised to do so if his party lost. For now, the two parties say their priorities are to restore the independence of the judiciary, by reinstating the justices Musharraf removed last year, and to lift press restrictions. They can’t do anything, though, until one or both parties form a government—and that could take weeks.