Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf has confounded his enemies foreign and domestic by neither rigging nor canceling the general election

National Review, March 10, 2008

Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf has confounded his enemies foreign and domestic by neither rigging nor canceling the general election. It would have been easy for him to fix the polls, and in keeping not just with his overblown reputation as a sinister Latin American--style dictator, but also with Pakistani democratic norms.

Prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a great progressive hero, famously rigged the 1977 election (even though he would have won it anyway). Instead, Musharraf has played relatively fair. His security forces, moreover, were able to ensure that the elections were not disrupted by terrorist bombs or a more than usually high level of violence. For a president accused of both authoritarianism and incompetence it was an impressive achievement. It will be interesting to see if the leaders of the country's victorious opposition parties can turn over their own new leaves and form a relatively competent, honest, and public-spirited government. (Low turnout evinced the population's deep and justified skepticism about the political class.) Musharraf's allies did so poorly against the country's two main opposition parties that Musharraf may not survive either as president or as the country's dominant political figure. Benazir Bhutto's sinister widower, Asif Ali Zardari, who inherited her political party, the PPP, seems willing to form a coalition government with his late wife's archenemy, former prime minister and Saudi Arabian protege Nawaz Sharif. At that point an impeachment will be likely, as also the release from house arrest of nuclear-secrets thief A. Q. Khan.