Twirp : Terrorist Wahabi Islamic Republic Pakistan

[ramana]

Night Watch report on TSP election results

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Pakistan:  <b>An early New York Times headline mourned that no clear winner emerged from today’s elections. It did not mention that there is a clear loser:  musharraf. </b> Most ministers in the government, the president of musharraf’s party, the chief ministers of the provinces and musharraf’s main backers-- the Chaudhry political machine of Gujarat -- were voted from office in landslides for the opposition. <b>The vote was a referendum on musharraf. His obduracy has ensured that none of his policies are safe because they now have no advocates in any of the legislatures for the next five years.</b>

Local press has projected that Bhutto’s Pakistan People's Party (PPP) will win 110 seats and Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) will 100 seats of the 268 open for direct election. An additional 60 seats are reserved for women and minorities. <b>The PPP and PML-N leaders announced their coalition agreement on Friday.</b>

The pro-musharraf Pakistan Muslim League-Q (PML-Q) is projected to take 20-30 seats; the same number as the Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party, and several other small parties. <b>The vote is such a rout that a leader of PML-Q and a personal friend of musharraf said today that the “party is finished.”  If that was more than rhetorical flourish, there might not be an opposition party. Then musharraf would be in danger of impeachment. The constitution requires a three-fourth’s vote of the National Assembly to impeach the president, which translates into 256 seats in the parliament.</b>

<b>A few hours after the size of the defeat became clear, the government eased up on the restrictions against Aitzaz Ahsan, the leader of the lawyers’ movement that has opposed the president.</b> Musharraf announced he would work with the winner. Yesterday he promised to act as a “father figure” for the new prime minister.  <b>He did not say that he would keep his word to step down if the election went against him – which he made in a TV interview on 3 February -- or whether likely impeachment moves against him would change his paternal attitude.</b>

In the provinces, The News projected that <b>Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N will control the Punjab assembly and might gain a majority</b>. <b>The PPP’s stronghold is Sindh Province. Most of the reports of vote tampering, ballot box theft and intimidation occurred in Sindh.  The turnout in Baluchistan was low but the Islamists did not fare well there either.</b>

In the North West Frontier Province, <b>local TV projected that the secular Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party has routed the Islamists. The head of the largest Islamist party and coalition, Maulana Fazlur Rehman of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam, and the Mutahiddah Majlis-i-Amal (MMA)was  defeated in Rehman's hometown in Dera Ismail Khan, a district of North-West Frontier Province, GEO TV reported. </b>

A sidebar in North West Frontier Province is that many women voted in defiance of threats of “traditional tribal “punishment by male fundamentalist religious leaders.

Many observers have concluded the election was free and fair, apparently based on the size of the landslide repudiation of musharraf and his cronies. The margin of musharraf’s defeat is so large that it obscures and minimizes the impact of widespread fraud. In some constituencies that had close races, voter fraud by the local polling agents with police support has been charged. Boxes of pre-marked ballots were discovered in Sindh. One candidate was shot. Voters were intimidated but apparently even the agents of intimidation voted against musharraf.

The election sets the stage for the constitutional struggle. <b>All of Pakistan’s policies resulted from musharraf’s use of his position as head of state to usurp the power of the prime minister as head of government.</b>  The presidency is a figurehead in Pakistan’s constitutional system unless parliament abdicates its authority, as it had done under musharraf through the rigged elections of 2002.

The voters have corrected the system. <b>Power will reside in the cabinet and the cabinet will be anti-US, as are most Pakistanis, according to all the polls. Both the PPP and the PML-N leaders campaigned against musharraf’s pro-US policies because the US openly backed musharraf the man, not Pakistan the country. President Bush called musharraf a US ally in the war on terror. He did not say Pakistan was. Assistant Secretary of State Boucher called musharraf indispensable. If those sentiments are accurate, US policy shares the fortunes of musharraf.</b>

The US will not get credit for pressuring musharraf into holding elections; only for not stopping his attack on the judiciary, his attack on the Red Mosque and his national emergency.
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