Are free elections possible in Pakistan?

What happened

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf promised to hold general elections by Jan. 9, but opposition leaders questioned whether the vote could be free and fair since Musharraf didn’t say he would lift the state of emergency he declared earlier this month.

What the commentators said

Subscribe to 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

Unless Musharraf restores constitutuional rule, said The Washington Times in an editorial, the elections will almost surely be a “sham.” And fair elections are the only way to “ratchet Pakistan’s political tensions down the several notches which Gen. Musharraf has raised them.” Unfortunately, Musharraf’s “ultimate concern” seems only to be keeping “his own grip on power.”

Musharraf faces a “stark choice,” said Benjamin Wittes in The New Republic. Up to now, he has “actually ruled with a light touch for a dictator.” How else would the lawyers now protesting in the streets have become such a confident and influential “elite”? Now he can “either accommodate the expectations and liberalize, or he can repress.”

It’s easy to write off Musharraf if you’re sitting half a world away, said Mark Steyn in National Review Online. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Musharraf promised to help fight a war on terror on his own terrirory, even though “99.9999 percent of his people are against” it. “In the teeth of that glum reality, he’s rode a difficult tightrope with some skill.” If history is any indication, any election would only usher in a corrupt democratic government, whose excesses would be stamped out by the next military dictator. So “the real question is how bad things will be after Musharraf.”