It looks like Musharraf’s party lost pretty badly in Pakistan’s elections there on Monday. So is this a good thing that will somehow change Pakistan for the better as many in the blogosphere seem to hope? Probably not is what I have asserted in the past. Vinod followed up with a great post about the dangers of an illiberal democracy. From an American perspective I find myself suddenly much more concerned about Pakistan now that Musharraf is in a weakened position there. I do not see this as some great victory of the people. Rather, it may just be a step out of the frying pan:

Early results showed a “big gain” for Mr Sharif and Ms Bhutto’s parties, Mr Azeem told the AFP news agency.

“If the results are confirmed we will play the part of the opposition as effectively as we can,” he said.

Most official counts will not be declared until later on Tuesday, and correspondents caution that it is still to early to be sure of the overall trends.

But high-profile victims of the poll were reported to include party president Chaudry Shujaat Hussain and his close ally, Railways Minister Sheikh Rashid.

They were among the PML-Q losses in Punjab, the country’s most populous province and a key electoral battleground.

“The result will be the voice of the nation and whosoever wins we should accept it - that includes myself,” said Mr Musharraf. [Link]

In Vinod’s earlier post he wrote the following (partly an analysis of a Zakaria article):

…the naked pursuit of Democracy - so the argument goes - becomes a sort of Cargo Cult pursued by well intentioned, often outside reformers with potentially tragic results. In an incorrigibly tribal or sectarian context, elections can merely result in one group gaining the bludgeon of state power to loot the assets and trample the rights of another.

Before Zakaria, the Founding Fathers famously used the aphorism “Tyranny of the Majority” and the diktat “People Get the Government They Deserve” to describe exactly such a breakdown. The implication is that in our politically-correct, post-modern world, while criticism of the government flows easily from our lips, perhaps criticism of the “governed” doesn’t flow quite enough. [Link]

Speaking of “trampling the rights of another,” we also saw this story out of Pakistan today:

Posters of the Muslim world’s first female prime minister, the late Benazir Bhutto, fluttered in the wind. But the ballot boxes inside the women’s polling station of this impoverished village were empty Monday.

The elders of the village in the Islamic nation’s conservative northwest took their own vote the day before Pakistan staged its crucial elections. They decided women would not have a say in selecting the constituency’s national and provincial lawmakers.

No one defied the order, said Farida Begum, an election official at the largest segregated polling station in Khazana…

It was the same story in Sheikh Mohammedi, a village not far from recent violent clashes between Pakistan’s military and pro-Taliban insurgents farther out of the city. [Link]

More than ever, Pakistan needs a strong central government, especially to help combat the rising terrorist state within a state in its western provinces along the Afghan border. This new illiberal democracy we may be seeing the birth of may only exacerbate the situation there. As the different parties fight for control, terrorists and sepratists have some cover to pursue their own agendas. For those of you that missed it, three weeks ago there was a must-read op-ed in the New York Times by Selig S. Harrison, the director of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy and the author of “In Afghanistan’s Shadow,” a study of Baluch nationalism. If his analysis is true, Iraq isn’t the nation that we should be worried about in terms of breaking apart into separate countries. Pakistan may be headed down that road as well:

WHATEVER the outcome of the Pakistani elections, now scheduled for Feb. 18, the existing multiethnic Pakistani state is not likely to survive for long unless it is radically restructured.

Given enough American pressure, a loosely united, confederated Pakistan could still be preserved by reinstating and liberalizing the defunct 1973 Constitution, which has been shelved by successive military rulers. But as matters stand, the Punjabi-dominated regime of Pervez Musharraf is headed for a bloody confrontation with the country’s Pashtun, Baluch and Sindhi minorities that could well lead to the breakup of Pakistan into three sovereign entities.

In that event, the Pashtuns, concentrated in the northwestern tribal areas, would join with their ethnic brethren across the Afghan border (some 40 million of them combined) to form an independent “Pashtunistan.” The Sindhis in the southeast, numbering 23 million, would unite with the six million Baluch tribesmen in the southwest to establish a federation along the Arabian Sea from India to Iran. “Pakistan” would then be a nuclear-armed Punjabi rump state.

In historical context, such a breakup would not be surprising. There had never been a national entity encompassing the areas now constituting Pakistan, an ethnic mélange thrown together hastily by the British for strategic reasons when they partitioned the subcontinent in 1947.

Harrison ends by suggesting that elected officials won’t really be able to stabilize Pakistan. That role will always fall to the army. A strong Pakistani Army still seems to be the best path to eventually, someday, establishing a liberal democracy:

It is often argued that the United States must stand by Mr. Musharraf and a unitary Pakistani state to safeguard Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. But the nuclear safeguards depend on the Pakistani Army as an institution, not on the president. They would not be affected by a break-up, since the nuclear weapons would remain under the control of the Punjabi rump state and its army.

The Army has built up a far-flung empire of economic enterprises in all parts of Pakistan with assets in the tens of billions, and can best protect its interests by defusing the escalating conflict with the minorities. Similarly, the minorities would profit from cooperative economic relations with the Punjab, and for this reason prefer confederal autonomy to secession. All concerned, including the United States, have a profound stake in stopping the present slide to Balkanization.

So what will we see play out in Pakistan? There will be celebrations for a few weeks. Everyone will denigrate Musharraf some more for good measure. Then the people will see that their new democracy, probably composed of a weak and continually warring “coalition,” isn’t all that and that their leaders are as corrupt as they were the first time around. Eventually the new general in charge of the army will be forced to take over, just like Musharraf did eight years ago. But hey, I don’t mean to be a party pooper. I truly hope that at the very least we see the birth of a new breed of Pakistani politicians (not like the corrupt Bhutto and Sharif). If that is the only thing we see come of this (two or three superstar leaders of tomorrow) then that is still some comfort.