{"id":1494529,"date":"2024-02-11T20:22:35","date_gmt":"2024-02-11T20:22:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=460967"},"modified":"2024-02-11T20:22:35","modified_gmt":"2024-02-11T20:22:35","slug":"pakistan-election-latest-updates-on-imran-khan-and-ptis-surge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/02\/11\/pakistan-election-latest-updates-on-imran-khan-and-ptis-surge\/","title":{"rendered":"Pakistan Election: Latest Updates On Imran Khan and PTI’s Surge"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This article was originally published as a newsletter from Ryan Grim. <\/em>Sign up to get the next one in your inbox.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When covering the<\/span> politics of foreign countries, it\u2019s hard for me not to transpose what\u2019s going on there back onto the United States and try to see it from that perspective. That\u2019s made easier in Pakistan since we have roughly similar population sizes and much of Pakistani politics plays out in spectacle on Twitter and Facebook. That much of it is in English helps too (as does the \u201ctranslate\u201d button).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet what Pakistani voters managed to pull off over the past few days strains my imagination to its breaking point. I just can\u2019t picture us doing it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consider this: The leading opposition party, the populist PTI, led by legendary cricket star Imran Khan, was officially banned from the ballots by the courts. Its candidates were forced to run as independents instead. The candidates were prohibited from using the PTI\u2019s party symbol \u2013 a cricket bat \u2013 on the ballot, a crucial marker in a country where some 40 percent of the population can\u2019t read. Khan himself was jailed on bogus charges and ruled ineligible to run. Candidates who did file to run were abducted and tortured and pressured to withdraw. So were the new ones who then replaced them. Virtually the entire party leadership was imprisoned or exiled. Rallies were attacked and bombed; rank and file workers jailed and disappeared. Campaigning was basically impossible as candidates had to go into hiding. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On election day Thursday, polling locations were randomly changed and the internet and cell service was taken down. Western media described the race as over, a fait accompli for the military\u2019s preferred candidate Nawaz Sharif. And yet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet. Pakistani voters came out in such historic numbers that it caught the military off guard. The ISI \u2014 Pakistan\u2019s powerful intelligence agency \u2014 was prepared to steal a close election or nudge Sharif to his inevitable victory, but they were swamped by the tsunami they didn\u2019t see coming. In a crucial mistake, they had allowed individual polling locations to release official vote tallies, which parties and TV broadcasters could then total up themselves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to those broadcasts, watched by millions of people, PTI (or \u201cindependent\u201d) candidates had won 137 seats by official counts, well on their way to a majority (there are 342 seats in the National Assembly; 266 are filled by direct elections). There were another 24 seats<\/a> where 90 percent of the vote was counted and PTI was ahead. It was a clear landslide. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then the military moved in, shutting down the election commission website and halting the count. Military and police forces surged into polling locations. Fantastical numbers began to be announced, sometimes just reversing the totals so the winner became the loser. The military was clearly unprepared to steal such a resounding victory, and the obviousness of the fraud forced politicians in the UK and U.S., including even the State Department, to denounce it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this puts the State Department in a difficult position. It\u2019s widely known the U.S. is no fan of Imran Khan. The U.S. prefers to work directly with the Pakistan military as a check against China. Khan has long said he wants a better relationship with the U.S., yet we refuse to believe him \u2013 our preferred approach was to oust him, put in more pliant clients, and shrug as the military dismantled democracy in the runup to the election. (The U.S. denied playing a role in ousting him, but we very much did, as The Intercept reported<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That approach has now failed.  The military-backed client proved unable to run their own country, losing all faith from the Pakistani people. The establishment in Pakistan may still be able to form a coalition government through fraud and abuse, but that doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019ll come out on top. The Pakistani people showed they can\u2019t be held back anymore. When their will finally translates into real power is only a matter of time. The U.S. can delay it, but can\u2019t stop it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

At this point, the State Department\u2019s choice is either to respect the will of the Pakistani public and find a way to work with Khan, or discard all the talk about democracy and usher in a full military dictatorship, one without the pretense of even a civilian hybrid. It\u2019s not clear which route we\u2019ll take, but the pressure from Congress and the fairly strong statement from the State Department suggests the generals may be losing favor in Washington.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Thursday afternoon at the State Department, I told spokesperson Vedant Patel <\/a>that the military\u2019s clear strategy after the election was to abduct, torture, and bribe the independent candidates into switching parties. If PTI candidates won the election, I asked, but were coerced into changing parties, would the U.S. recognize such a government? My mistake was asking a hypothetical, even an easily foreseeable one, because spokespeople are good at ignoring such questions. Patel called it a \u201cmade up\u201d scenario and wouldn\u2019t commit either way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One winning candidate, Waseem Qadir, has already flipped<\/a>. Elected to the national assembly as a PTI-affiliated independent, he claims he was abducted and is now supporting Nawaz Sharif\u2019s party. Skeptics believe he was actually bribed, not tortured, and there protests outside his home \u2013 but either way, neither scenario is remotely democratic. The scenario is no longer made up, it\u2019s real, and the State Department has some decisions to make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote in more detail<\/a> about all of this on Friday and talked about it with my colleague Murtaza Hussain and Pakistani journalist Waqas Ahmed on Breaking Points<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, can you imagine American voters overcoming those sorts of obstacles to get to the polls? I want to leave you with the opening anecdote from my story Friday, one of the most inspiring (and infuriating stories I\u2019ve ever come across in politics):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Pakistan, a bystander happened to catch, on camera, police raiding the Sialkot home of Usman Dar. At the time, Dar was an opposition candidate representing former Prime Minister Imran Khan\u2019s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, party \u2014 which the military and its civilian allies were busy suppressing with abductions, raids, blackmail, and threats. Khan, a populist prime minister, was forced from office in 2022 under military pressure with the encouragement of the U.S. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through a window, video shows Pakistani police officials assaulting Dar\u2019s elderly mother, Rehana Dar, in her bedroom. Dar\u2019s brother, Umar Dar, was also picked up, though police only acknowledged he\u2019d been arrested much later at a court hearing. When Usman Dar emerged from custody, he announced he was stepping down from the race and leaving the party \u2014 as many other PTI candidates have done under similar pressure.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But then came a new wrinkle, a symbol of the refusal of Khan\u2019s supporters to bow to the military-backed government. While the news was announced that Dar was withdrawing from the race, and with another son still missing, his mother went on television to say that she would be running instead. \u201cKhawaja Asif,\u201d Rehana Dar said in a video posted on social media directed to the army-backed political rival of her son, \u201cYou have achieved what you wanted by making my son step down at gunpoint, but my son has quit politics, not me. Now you will face me in politics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was a political novice, an angry mother who represented the country\u2019s frustration with its ruling elite. \u201cSend me to jail or handcuff me. I will contest the general elections for sure,\u201d she said while filing her nomination papers. Those papers were initially rejected \u2014 like they were for so many PTI candidates, and only PTI candidates \u2014 and she had to refile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless, she persisted. On Thursday night, election night, with her son Umar still in custody, she shocked the country. With 99 percent of precincts counted, she had beaten that lifetime politician, Khawaja Asif, with 131,615 to 82,615 votes. The loss by Asif, who was allied with Nawaz Sharif \u2014 the military-backed candidate whose victory Vox had called \u201calmost a fait accompli\u201d \u2014 was a blow to the army.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then came one more wrinkle \u2014 one that many in Pakistan expected, but which was still shocking. When the full results were announced, Dar\u2019s total had been reduced by 31,434 votes, while Asif gained votes, and he was declared the winner. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Across the country, similar reversals are flowing out from Pakistan\u2019s election commission. As polling ended Thursday evening, early results shocked the establishment and even some dispirited supporters of Khan who had worried that Pakistani authorities had successfully done everything they could to manipulate the outcome. Those results suggested a landslide victory for ousted former Prime Minister Imran Khan\u2019s party even as Khan himself sits in prison, ineligible to run. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in several key races, results have suddenly swung toward the military-backed party, after hours of unexplained delays. In the NA-128 constituency, where the PTI-backed candidate is senior lawyer Salman Akram Raja, Raja was leading with 100,000 votes in 1,310 out of 1,320 polling stations. On Friday, he was trailing by 13,522 votes. But the publicly available totals from the polling stations did not add up with the results announced by the election commission. He took the case to high court, which granted him a stay and stopped the election commission from announcing the winner pending further investigation. Following his lead, multiple PTI candidates have announced that they will take their cases to court. Rehana Dar is one of them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Read the full story here.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The post Pakistan Election: Latest Updates On Imran Khan and PTI’s Surge<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on The Intercept<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And why the U.S. State Department is now in a difficult position on Pakistan.<\/p>\n

The post Pakistan Election: Latest Updates On Imran Khan and PTI\u2019s Surge<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":93,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68890],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1494529"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/93"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1494529"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1494529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1496487,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1494529\/revisions\/1496487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1494529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1494529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1494529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}