NYT : Vote Is Expected to Further Weaken Musharraf

Vote Is Expected to Further Weaken Musharraf

By CARLOTTA GALL and JANE PERLEZ | February 18, 2008

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistanis began voting Monday morning in parliamentary elections that are expected to diminish President Pervez Musharraf further and present Washington with a challenging new political lineup here as it pursues its fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the region.

The vote, which was delayed after the assassination of the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto nearly two months ago, comes amid anxiety of further political turmoil if the government manipulates the results or enters a battle with the opposition parties over forming a government. Reuters reported that 80,000 troops were backing up police, keeping watch over polling places.

At least four candidates, including Ms. Bhutto, and nearly 100 other Pakistanis have been killed during the campaign. Parties have reported kidnappings and arrests of candidates and attempts to intimidate their families, according to Sheila Fruman, director of the National Democratic Institute’s office in Pakistan. The opposition has threatened street protests if the vote is perceived to be unfair, but has also called for a government of national consensus.

American officials and others here hope that the election provides a fresh opportunity for a new civilian government to rally Pakistanis behind the fight against the militants who now threaten the security and stability of the country.

After growing frustration with eight years of military rule, opposition politicians and analysts argue that Mr. Musharraf has lost the support of the people and cannot fight extremism effectively without it.

With the country facing a growing insurgency by the Taliban and Al Qaeda, rising prices and escalating violence, the nationwide vote will now serve as a kind of referendum on Mr. Musharraf, who has grown deeply unpopular.

No matter which party prevails, Mr. Musharraf, who has been Washington’s partner in the campaign against terrorism for the past six years, is almost certain to emerge further reduced in the post-election skirmishing.

He is already much weakened after resigning as army chief in November, and a popularly elected prime minister with the backing of Parliament will emerge as a competitive new force.

The party that has supported Mr. Musharraf for the past five years, the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, is expected to fare considerably worse than it did in the last election.

The party of Ms. Bhutto, the Pakistan Peoples Party, is riding a wave of sympathy after her death and may emerge as the largest party in Parliament, analysts say.

Ms. Bhutto’s party, which is now led by her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, and the party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan Muslim League-N, are moderate parties opposed to terrorism.

They argue that only a popularly elected government can bring the country together to oppose militancy. For his part, Mr. Zardari has also called for a government of national consensus after the election and has not ruled out working with Mr. Musharraf.

The insurgency remains at the top of the Bush administration’s agenda here, and American officials have started to prepare for Mr. Musharraf’s eventual exit. In a series of high-level visits in the past month on how to stem the militants’ efforts to destabilize Pakistan, Washington officials have focused on the new army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, an implicit recognition of the shifting balance of power.

Despite the complaints about violence in the campaign and the potential for fraud, the Bush administration has appeared determined to validate the election as a satisfactory exercise in democracy. Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, recently told a Congressional committee that he was looking for “as fair an election as possible.”

International observers, including several United States senators who arrived Sunday, have already warned of serious flaws in the pre-election process. They have said that at best the election would be deemed “credible,” rather than free and fair.

The biggest question will be to what extent the government apparatus will try to manipulate the results in favor of the pro-Musharraf party. If the elections are skewed too far in its favor, the government risks large protests and violence.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said after arriving in Lahore on Sunday night as an election observer that he was “mildly optimistic” that the election would be “fairly credible.”

But Mr. Biden said that if the election turned out to be seriously flawed, he would seek to curtail United States military aid to Pakistan. Two other members of the foreign relations committee, Senators Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, and John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, also arrived to observe the election.

Ms. Fruman, of the National Democratic Institute, described a litany of complaints, mostly from opposition parties, of bribery and the use of state resources for campaigns. The production of counterfeit identity cards was uncovered in the town of Quetta when a package of 3,000 fake cards split open, Ms. Fruman said. Millions of names were found to have been missing from voter rolls, including, in one case, an entire village where support was strong for the Pakistan Peoples Party, she said.

“We cannot verify them, but in many cases the same complaints have come from different parties,” Ms. Fruman said. The irregularities were consistent with the trends described in the institute’s pre-election mission report, she said. Any one such incident, she added, “would be enough to stop elections in the West.”

Mr. Musharraf has promised free and fair elections and has warned parties not to protest if they lose. “I assure you that the elections will be fair, free and transparent and peaceful,” he said at a seminar in Islamabad, the capital, last week, the state-run Associated Press of Pakistan reported.

“Let there be no doubt that anyone will be allowed to resort to lawlessness in the garb of allegations about rigging in the elections,” he was quoted as saying.

Yet even the attorney general, Malik Muhammad Qayyum, seemed to acknowledge government interference in a telephone conversation with an acquaintance, which was recorded by a journalist in November. “They will massively rig to get their own people to win,” Mr. Qayyum said, apparently referring to the government.

Mr. Qayyum has since denied that the conversation occurred, but a transcript was released by Human Rights Watch, a New York-based organization. Mr. Qayyum had taken the call from his acquaintance while still on the line with the journalist, who had been interviewing him.

In a first for Pakistan, an estimated 20,000 volunteers have fanned out across the country to monitor polling stations, as well as the critical counting process that will be conducted by election officials at district courthouses after the polls close. But as many as 4,000 of them were denied accreditation to monitor the vote by government officials in Punjab, the most important province in the election.

The small army of volunteers is organized by the Free and Fair Election Network, which is financed in part by the United States Agency for International Development. Many of the monitors are in their 20s and 30s, eager to help make the election process fairer. They will conduct a parallel vote count Monday night in 264 of the 272 parliamentary constituencies.

A report by the Free and Fair Election Network released Feb. 5 said mayors had been supporting certain candidates by urging voters to vote for them, attending their rallies and allowing them to use resources like official cars and premises. “Most support is reported to have been in favor of the Pakistan Muslim League-Q,” Mr. Musharraf’s party, the report said.

The most sensitive hours of the election, according to experts, will be the counting of the ballots. The 272 officials who will count them are lower-court judges chosen by the national election commission, and many are in thrall to high-court judges appointed by the Musharraf government.

The IFES (formerly the International Foundation for Election Systems), a nonpartisan group, had advised the Pakistanis to change the counting system to make it less vulnerable to fraud, Western diplomats said. The changes, which would have involved requiring the returning officers to announce the constituency results polling station by polling station, had been rebuffed, they said.

Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, the former chief minister of Punjab and Mr. Musharraf’s candidate for prime minister, sounding more optimistic than even most officials of the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, said he expected the party to win “100-plus seats” of the 148 parliamentary seats in Punjab.

The party dominated local government in Punjab, and local mayors would bring voters to the polls to vote for the Muslim League-Q ticket, he said. Most analysts say that even though Pakistani parliamentary elections turn on local politics, Mr. Elahi’s projection is exceptionally generous.