Pakistan Parties Prepare for Elections
Tomorrow, Saturday, the Pakistani people will have the opportunity to vote for the person they consider best able to lead their country.The three most important candidates and parties started a final push on Friday to convince voters to vote for them. It are important elections for Pakistan is riven by economic problems and Islamic extremists. In the last year alone bombings and suicide attacks killed more than 1,200 people.The elections come after the long and stable rule of Pervez Musharraf, who was forced to resign recently because parliament had united to oust him from office. Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s widower, is most likely to win the race for president, but the other two leading candidate have not given up just yet. Pakistan’s elections have already proven to be both chaotic and violent. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani was the target of an assassination attempt yesterday. His car was hit by sniper fire. Luckily he was not in the car at the moment his enemies struck. Zardari has said he supports the United States in the war on terrorism. The main reason for this support is not moral; it is financial or economical. Pakistan is heavily dependent on U.S. aide. George W. Bush’s administration has sent many dollars to Pakistan after 9/11, in return for support in the war on terrorism. If this aide would disappear, Pakistan would have a major problem. It is unlikely that Zardari will fight extremists more aggressively than Musharraf did. One major reason for Musharraf’s unpopularity in the last months and years of his presidency was his support for the U.S. If Zardari wants to stay in power for a considerable amount of time - and he does of course - he can probably not afford to support the U.S. too strongly. Unlike Musharraf had, Zardari does not have the support from the military to back him up in case of trouble. As a result, he is unlikely to do much against Islamic radicals. He will, probably, appease them much more than Musharraf did. The above forces one to wonder whether it was wise for the United States to stop supporting the former president, Musharraf. The sad reality is, though, that at the moment the Pakistani people turned away from their president and especially when the Pakistani army stopped supporting him, there was not much more the U.S. could do. Keeping an unpopular president in power of a developing country has been tried in the past, and the results have nearly always been catastrophic.
