Center for International Policy

Improving the chances of a fair election
By Selig S. Harrison
October 24, 2007

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The arcane legal shenanigans that have accompanied Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's re-election and his U.S.-supported "power-sharing" deal with former prime minister Benazir Bhutto have obscured the real issue now emerging in Pakistan: Will Ms. Bhutto have a fair shot at winning a decisive majority in the National Assembly elections next January? Will she get enough assembly seats to demand a share of power, or will she merely provide a civilian facade for continued military rule?

Her narrow escape from assassination by suicide bombers after her return from an eight-year exile shows she will be lucky to get through the campaign alive. But if she does, past experience and mounting recent evidence indicate that the January election, like most previous ones in Pakistan, will be rigged, unless Pakistan's U.S. and European aid donors strongly intervene.

The Musharraf-appointed Election Commission has already started the rigging process by seeking to deny voting rights to an estimated 27 million voters-- mostly women. In the last presidential election in 2002, 71.8 million voters were on the rolls. With the population growing at a rate of 2.7 per cent and a voting age of 18, the number of eligible voters should have risen to 82 million, Ms. Bhutto argued in a June 25 petition to the Supreme Court. Instead, the list published by the commission numbered only 55 million. Ms. Bhutto submitted evidence that the most serious tampering with the lists had occurred in opposition strongholds.

"Relying on bribery, coercion and electoral manipulation," declared the respected International Crisis Group in a recent study, successive military regimes in Pakistan have rigged elections, and General Musharraf, too, since ousting an elected government eight years ago, "has relied on constitutional manipulation and electoral rigging to retain power."

Some of this has been obvious to visiting monitoring groups, such as the European Union Election Observation Mission, which called the 2002 presidential election "deeply flawed." But my own conclusion after five decades of covering Pakistan is that the coercion cited by the Crisis Group generally consists of covert intimidation by civilian and military intelligence agencies that is not readily visible to outsiders.

The director of the civilian Intelligence Bureau, General Ejaz Shah, a well-known Islamist sympathizer, was assiged to provide security to Ms. Bhutto's procession from the airport after her return, and she has angrily doubted whether his failure to stop the suicide bombers was accidental. Ms. Bhutto has called on Gen. Musharraf for assurances that Intelligence Bureau agents will not disrupt her rallies. In past elections, the directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has tried to discourage attractive candidates from running on the opposition ticket through financial pressures and direct physical threats.

Rigging is easier to prove than covert intimidation. In a recent editorial, the leading Pakistani daily, Dawn, cited evidence that the Election Commission has already hired handpicked government personnel to oversee nominations and man the polling stations in January to assure "multiple and bogus voting by a variety of means." The editorial emphasized the need for measures to prevent police constables from tampering with ballots, on the pretext of helping illiterate voters, and from stuffing ballot boxes while they are being transported from polling stations to election headquarters.

What should the U.S. do to improve the chances for a fair election? The International Crisis Group report makes 14 specific recommendations, four of which particularly deserve U.S. support.

First, a genuinely neutral caretaker government should be formed in consultation with the opposition parties to revamp the Election Commission and supervise the elections. Second, to level the playing field, political prisoners should be released and all political parties should have equal access to the state media and regain the freedom, now denied, to organize rallies.

Third, adequately staffed foreign election observer missions should be permitted to come to Pakistan, not at the last minute, but starting at least three months ahead of election day, to assess the procedures.

Most important, further military assistance to Islamabad should be conditional on fair elections and on "the military accepting the supremacy of the civilian government after the elections."

The Crisis Group did not spell out how a neutral interim government could be put in place while Gen. Musharraf is still in power. High-level U.S. and European Union pressure would be needed to get him to appoint an independent figure, such as Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, to run the interim government.

To make its pressure effective, the U.S. would have to threaten to cut off not only its quite small program of military aid ($1.5-billion), but the direct subsidies to the Pakistani armed forces that reached $4.5-billion so far. These subsidies, described as a reimbursement for counter-terrorism operations, flow whether or not Pakistani forces come out of their barracks in Afghan border areas in any given month. A threat to stop these payments, failing democratization, would get Gen. Musharraf's attention. And it would serve notice that the U.S. is rapidly losing patience with the reluctance of Pakistani forces to confront Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters effectively in the Afghan border areas.