A Comment on Pakistan

So the dust is finally settling after the Pakistani election, and with the exception of a few delays in the tribal areas, the results for the Provincial and National Assemblies are in. The score in the NA is below. (courtesy of the BBC, not that I ever asked them)
There is much that can be said about these results, but a large part of the story here is that the elections was relatively peaceful, and relatively fair, despite some accusations of rigging and some deaths due to related violence. Turnout in many areas was low, but I can't believe that the fear of violence kept Pakistanis from the polls - they are generally made of sterner stuff than that. If Pakistanis decided not to vote, the more likely reason was that they didn't feel that it would change anything.

Those of us who might have been willing to excuse Musharraf's relatively benign, though undemocratic rule in his first 4 or 5 years stopped being able to do that in the last two years. As dictators go, he wasn't all that bad , but it became clear that his desire to cling to power, his lack of understanding of how to implement civilian policy, and his deliberate, vindictive corruption of the judiciary.

That said, some credit is due - history should not be kind to Musharraf, but one hopes that it will treat him better than it treats Zia-ul Huq, the last military man to ostentatiously assume the role of Pakistan's saviour while running the place into the ground. After all, Musharraf did preside over an election where his puppet, the PML-Q, and his crafty bedfellow, the MQM, were both losers while his frank enemy, Nawaz Sharif, and the PPP (actually, the BPP, since the succession at its helm proved that it is really Bhutto's Personal Party) wound up being the big winners.

In most countries "he chose not to continue eroding the foundations of democracy" is not really a compliment. In Pakistan though, you take what you can get.