 Thank you all for joining us for the second panel this morning. We had a really interesting discussion in the earlier panel about the political and the details of the 25th July elections. I think it's really interesting for this historic moment in Pakistan. As mentioned in the morning session, there are 10 years of uninterrupted democratic rule and now we're seeing the second transition from one democratic government to another. But at the same time, you know, as our Moid Yusuf here at USIP says, Pakistan is facing a schizophrenic movement. At the same time these historic elections happened, there were out-and-out election allegations of pre-poll rigging, manipulation, intimidation, open allegations at the military, judiciary, there was militant group and terrorist violence including from ISIS. And so we wanted to spend this next hour so focused on the non-electoral aspects of these elections and we have a great panel here to discuss these issues with you all. I will briefly just tell you who everyone is and then they can go into more detail. First we'll have Yasir Qureshi who recently completed his PhD in politics from Brandeis and is soon joining the Contemporary South Asian Studies Program at Oxford University as a visiting scholar. And he will be speaking to us about the role of the judiciary in these elections. And next we'll have Josh White who is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins SICE and he will be speaking about the role of religious parties and militant groups. Next we have Dr. Sahar Khan from the Cato Institute and she'll be discussing the role of the military which I know we had a lot of questions about in the first panel. And last but not least we have Dr. Neal Firsadiki who's assistant professor of political science at SUNY Albany and is also a USIP research partner working with us on violence in Karachi and she'll be talking more generally about election violence. Each of our panelists will speak for about 10 or 12 minutes and then hopefully we can all engage in an interesting conversation. So go ahead Yasir. Thank you everyone for being here today it's great to be part of this panel and I think it's safe to say that you know in the months leading up to the elections the Pakistani courts took center stage you know judges and courts dominated headlines their image was a plastered across the screens I think one op-ed described the period as the judicialization of everything in Pakistan at the time and in this brief discussion I'll discuss the you know expanding role the judiciary has sought to play how this role manifested in its actions how it legitimizes this role and what impact it had on the election and finally what challenges this poses to the post-election order. So in the aftermath of the clash between the Supreme Court in general Musharraf in 2007 which was backed by the lawyer's movement that I think Sahar referred to in the previous panel the judiciary now sees itself as a major political stakeholder and seeks to play the role of a guardian of the political system. So after that clash it now seeks to play essentially a similar role to the military an arbiter and overseer of Pakistan's political system checking corruptions and excesses by Pakistan's political power centers an essential institution that is allegedly beyond corruption and can bring governance to the country at least that is a self-conception it's operating under and this realizes itself in two types of actions one is intervening in leadership selections and the other the judicialization of governance. So on the question of leadership selection the the court acts on article 62 and 63 which have made a lot of news lately which basically set the conditions for qualifying to run for elections and being a member of parliament and article 62 sets up a big standard of morality and sagacity which the courts have interpreted broadly to grant themselves power to disqualify political leaders who they deem to fall short of these judicially determined standards and in recent months and years they've been actively using this power to disqualify candidates and parliamentarians who they deem corrupt even from political office the most famous of course being Nawaz Sharif but several others suffered the same fate in the last year as well and they they heighten the stakes by making this a lifetime disqualification. The other is the judicialization of governance so driven by the same logic of combat and corruption the district has also intervened in many aspects of governance by the executive. So under article 184-3 of the constitution the supreme court can intervene directly without even a petition necessary in matters related to fundamental rights that also are said to affect the national public interest and of course being the interpreter of the constitution they get to interpret what affects the public interest very broadly and the court has done this to allow to intervene in all manners of governance including challenging bureaucratic appointments questioning government officials on corruption prescribing judicially determined targets for particular policy reforms and policy interventions and results and the courts have clearly moved beyond any procedural or previously determined understanding of the separation of power and in doing so they're acutely aware and conscious of their political standing and legitimacy and popularity and you know we've seen this in the past in Pakistan that throughout our history unelected institutions have justified their interventions in Pakistan's politics and regulation of its political parties on the ground as being necessitated by the corruption and mismanagement of the political parties so the military has always used its doctrine of necessity to explain its interventions into the political system and the judiciary articulates a similar doctrine of judicial necessity to justify its movement beyond the separation of powers to take on legislative and executive functions and this is made clear in the language used by the judiciary in its decisions that clearly reflects this anti-corruption mission and plays on an anti-elitism and a presumption of corruption by Pakistan's political elite in the famous Panama judgment Justice Khosa opened the judgment with the line behind every great fortune there is a crime right that's this presumption of guilt that pervades their judgment and he later articulates the mission of the judiciary as cleansing the fountain head of Pakistani politics as this may trickle down to the rest of state and society so really this is this anti-corruption mission and role that they're articulating to explain their expanding power and in doing so the courts are acutely aware of maintaining the legitimacy of the expanding power than managing the optics of this role so in this they're guided by I think three principles one prioritizing the norms and the preferences of Pakistan's most vocal groups namely the urban middle and upper middle classes two aligning with the issues that gain the most coverage in favorable coverage in the news media and three accommodate the concerns of the political act of best equipped to undermine their authority and legitimacy namely the military so avoiding challenging the military and what this means in practice is that they would therefore expand their power on issues that matter to and resonate with the middle and upper middle classes and gain favorable coverage from the media and on which they don't expect the military to oppose them and we see this careful management of optics in the way the courts try to run up to the election present themselves as anti-corruption but not anti-democracy so take for example there was this case that came up regarding election forms so in 2017 the legislature under pmln passed an election law that removed the requirement for candidates to declare income tax on assets and liabilities in their forms when running for elections these declarations have been the basis of the article 62 and 63 cases through which the courts have been challenging and disqualifying candidates so just months before the election the lahore high court ruled that these forms needed to be reprinted with that declaration included and those details included again this raised the likelihood that the election would have to be delayed to accommodate this concern for of reprinting and speculation grew that the judiciary was trying to delay the elections and you know that the issue with acting anti-democratically chief justice nissar was keen to avoid this sort of labeling and he repeated me made statement on how they would ensure the elections were held on time and overruled the high court saying that the election form would not be reprinted but what he did was add ask candidates to attach a separate affidavit declaring these same declarations so here what's interesting about these optics the court could claim they ensure the elections were held on time and that's when not anti-democratic but they also by adding the affidavit now would directly be able to hold candidates in criminal contempt of court for misdeclarations of assets because this would constitute perjury so this allows the court to take more aggressive action in these cases without appearing anti-democratic and this is how the courts carefully balance these optics and so throughout the spirit we've seen the courts have been managing these optics and the court has essentially become a spectacle chief justice nissar routinely hauls in public officials and politicians give them very public dressing downs choosing officials who you know would have very little sympathy with the classes with you know the urban middle and upper middle classes and then generating media coverage for the way they put he puts them in place I you know I've attended some of his sessions and he'd begin his sessions by discussing newspaper articles remarks on what the court had been doing in the previous weeks as you know this is the extent to which the court has become so cognizant and wary of the way the media covers them and the conversation and the optics that they're you know presenting to their their you know the middle classes and these actions of the judiciary played a decisive role in shaping the electoral landscape in two critical ways so one is it would be hard to say that the PMLN did not bear the brunt of the court's anti-corruption disqualification zeal so from the vast reef to several other major political figures of the party being disqualified from running through article 62 and 63 cases this was the primary vehicle in which the PMLN was weakened by the courts in this period and it made sense from their perspective to choose the sheriffs as a target since they had been dogged by corruption allocations for many years they were known for their lavish lifestyle and there was very few people in the middle and upper middle classes who would doubt or question that there was corruption behind their wealth and their and in their history and further you know the media covered these very actively and also the military wanted to see you know in the vast reef weakened or removed that clearly were not close allies or friends so it would make sense if you want to expand your power to choose the sheriffs and the PMLN as a target against which to exercise and expand your role in the political system and you know so in this targeting the the like you know one case really how would I say emphasize the way this targeting was how targeted this was against the PMLN and this was the case of the the corruption scandal regarding the distribution of effigy and several politicians from several major political parties were implicated in scandal but while all the other major political figures were given were put out on bail the only one who was tried in the run-up to the election and sentenced to life was the one PMLN member of that scandal Hanifa Basi and you know it's hard not to see a targeted you know operation them targeting the PMLN through actions like this and it goes beyond this also by bringing PMLN figures before the court dressing them down rebuking them holding them in contempt of court for their statements in the media the the the the Supreme Court basically really made out made the PMLN out to be the target of their action and really used their pulpit to push back against the party and delegitimize them the second way was that the courts crucially shaped the narrative in the run-up to the election so as the judiciary continued its judicialization of governance its actions dominated the headlines and its focus was primarily on political corruption and public service delivery so these corruption cases along with you know the judges focused on hospitals hospitals schools healthcare all issues on which you know corruption and public service delivery were all issues on which the PTI benefit because that was their primary appeal and platform we will tackle corruption we will improve delivery of services like public health and education and these were exactly the issues essentially the courts were playing a role of setting the agenda of the conversation on the media in the coverage in the month leading up to the elections by focusing on these issues by talking about these by bringing in these cases and making the headlines about these issues they were shaping the narrative in the month leading up to the election in a way that inadvertently benefited the PTI because they had built their own platform on the very issues the Supreme Court was bringing focus on so there was sort of this inadvertent I wouldn't say deliberate collision or convergent of interest between the two as the judiciary would delegitimize the PMLN and gave the narrative of the PTI a boost in the run-up to the election but now in finding the aftermath of the election the question remains how will these two institutions deal with each other right the PTI and the judiciary because given that the judiciary the military and the PTI have all sort of built and expanded their power on the basis of this anti-corruption mission how would they all seek to maintain and expand their space to carry out this mission on their own terms will the PTI and the courts clash as the courts continue to check appointments made by the government they've already been several cases come up where the courts have picked up cases regarding MPA MPA members and police appointments made by the PTI will the with this alignment diminish that remains to be seen and furthermore in the aftermath of the election thousands of cases regarding the elections will now be heard by election tribunals that at the time are primarily staffed by serving judges so judges who serve under the Supreme Court and under the Chief Justice Sarkin Essar and thus the legitimacy of these elections and PTI's victory will be in the hands in many ways of these judges given the I think there are over 80 to 100 NACs upon which petitions are going to be heard by the election tribunals so in managing their relationship in the future both sides will have to carefully manage the optics to ensure that in challenging each other if they do they do not undermine their own legitimizing narrative as fighting corruption and misgovernance and and I think you know it's unclear right now how this you know these these institutions building the appeal on the same grounds will interact with each other in the upcoming future so thanks so much answer this very interesting especially the media circus comments about Josh please Josh will be talking to us as I said about religious parties and militant groups thank you it's a it's great being here I'm particularly pleased to be at this session for a couple reasons one is that I am an alum of the USIP Jennings Randolph peace scholars program so I had spent some time here and I'm excited about what USIP is doing and second I can't tell you how wonderful it is to be at a DC conference panel where we have not discussed the US Pakistan relationship or the trust deficit so I feel refreshed and you should as well by the the sheer political nerdiness of these conversations but the relevance of these topics to the future of Pakistan itself my job here is to talk about Islamic politics and also to help all of you at home who are trying to fill out your Pakistan acronym bingo of various parties and various various political dynamics will I'll try to try to support that when it comes to the role of Islamic parties in this recent general election the headline has been that the Islamic parties performed poorly in the election and that is true they won only 12 national assembly seats about 4 of the total seats they only won about 10 of the provincial seats in 16 in Balochistan and negligible amounts and the other provincial assemblies and some of the high-profile parties that I will talk about like the Tariq al-Baik Pakistan the last three type of linked alawak bar Tariq they got no assembly seats in the national assembly and did not do very well all of this is true it's also true that behind this top-line observation there are I think some other interesting things that could be said about the role of these parties and what we can see in the in their campaigning and in the data so I want to put forward four observations beyond the top line that they didn't do very well and the first of these observations is that there was a noticeable disconnect between the popular vote for religious parties overall and the number of seats that they received if you look at the percentage of votes cast for national assembly seats for the religious parties broadly defined you know their high water mark is is seen to be in 2002 where there was a favorable geopolitical environment and the MMA coalition did quite well they received about 11.4 percent of the vote it went downhill from there in 2008 they only got 2.2 percent because the Jamati Islami one of the large constituent parties of the alliance boycotted and then in 2013 the two major parties together got about five and a half percent of the vote in this recent election in 2018 the religious parties broadly were up to about nine and a half percent of the vote and so it raises the question so why didn't they get very many seats and the reason is that there the short reason is that there was a new actor on the scene the TLP which I'll talk about a little later and the religious party vote really split between the old guard the MMA and this new movement of the TLP each of which got you know between 2.2 and 2.5 million votes and the reason that the votes didn't translate into seats there are several complicated reasons the simple one is probably that they had very different geographic constituent bases with the MMA being strong and KP and in Balochistan and the TLP having some some modest strength at least in vote in terms of raw votes in Punjab and in Sindh and in the first past the post electoral system unless you can concentrate your voting power you're not going to get seats so the first simple story is that the top line of the percentage of people voting for religious party candidates was relatively high compared to their historical baseline but it didn't translate into very many seats that would be my first observation the second is that there were important changes in developments within the old guard within the MMA the the reconstituted alliance of Islamic political parties led by the JUIF and the Jamati Islami and again this alliance dates to 2002 has been an on again off again kind of relationship particularly between these two major parties and what happened in the 2018 election is that the Jamati Islami generally imploded that's the political science term I think imploded they did very poorly they got an MNA from Chitral which is to say the least a liminal area in Pakistan they pulled in an MPA from another remote area and they did poorly across the board their Amir their leader lost his MPA seat their election management and candidate selection was bungled across the board and they did they did very poorly I'm going to speak a little later as to one reason why this may have happened beyond simply bungling some of the pre-election management but they did not play this well the the JUIF by contrast had made an attempt beginning a couple years ago to try to expand their tent looking ahead I think to this 2018 election so they they worked hard in Balochistan to reintegrate a faction that had broken away some time ago the Naziri at the the ideological faction which was not ideological surprise surprise to bring them back into the fold and as a result the JUIF did rather well in Balochistan but if you look at the map of where they won seats in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa they were really pushed into the tribal areas the areas bordering the tribal areas and did very poorly in the urban areas the Peshawar Valley and over to the east where in previous years they'd had some strength so they were geographically constrained and they even though they did their best in Balochistan to pull to pull some of these folks back together the leader of the JUIF also lost his his election which was unfortunate for him although thankfully his son won the MNA election so it's still in the family I think if you're the this also raises questions if you're the JUIF about what good the Jamati Islami is for you in an alliance because the JI was mostly dead weight in this election and I think it will raise questions in the future both for for bi-elections and the next general election as to whether the JUIF would have done better if it had if it had not had to divide up the seats that it was contesting with an alliance partner also note that the the MMA came in second place in 25 seats nationally so they were modestly competitive broadly a lot of those were JUIF candidates so that's the second point changes within the old guard of the MMA the third and I think this is really perhaps the most important point although it's less empirical is that it strikes me that on issues of Islam and politics the policy entrepreneurship frontier has really shifted over the last few years which is to say you can see this on a few levels you can see first of all that Imran Khan arguably occupies a lot of the rhetorical space now that was once dominated by the MMA by the religious parties if you think about the discourse on Islamic law and society on a range of social issues on sort of Islamic populism on skepticism of the west on sympathy for the Taliban on a push to envision of how Afghanistan Pakistan cross border operation should work you can go down the list of policy issues and sort of issues of political discourse and the mainstream has has crowded out that space where the religious parties used to be what was once boundary pushing behavior by the MMA now looks rather stale and status quo because it's been taken over and some of these things you know in some of these cases the issues have just fallen off the radar because the issue of the west is not as salient as it was even a few years ago given the changing US relationship with Pakistan but I think what what's important to see is that the policy entrepreneurs in this space are now other groups like the the TLP and this is a Barelvi group you may remember the assassination of Salman Tassir in 2016 that led to this movement the Tariq al-Baiqya Rasool Allah which led to a political party that champions protecting the prophet from from blasphemy and this group which has endorsed vigilantism at times has pushed the policy envelope it has pushed the policy envelope both on domestic policy and the way that blasphemy is treated foreign policy and Pakistan's relationship with the Netherlands you know there are a number of issues where it is now the the policy entrepreneur in this election the TLP got a number of votes that surprised a number of people but it couldn't translate them into very many seats it didn't get any national assembly seats only one was even a close race in the provincial seats in which they chose to contest their median vote share was in Balochistan 1% in KP 2% in Punjab 5% and in Sind about 7% so they they gained two seats in Karachi and came in second place in about five seats and they displaced some of the PM some of the MQM vote so there's some signs that they were carving out some space for themselves but still quite in a tentative way there were a number of newspaper articles that said well if you look at all of the close races in Punjab and in Sind then you see the margin of victory in those races and then you look at the number of votes that TLP got if TLP wasn't in the race and this vote would have gone the other way and it so TLP took votes away from PMLN in you know a large number of seats 15 20 whatever I'm a little bit skeptical of that kind of argument because we simply don't know the substitution coefficients of what those voters would have done if the if the TLP wasn't there and that's very very hard to figure out so I'm not confident saying that they swung the election in a lot of these national assembly seats what we do know is that they're gaining some traction in terms of vote share in particular locales that are quite distinct from where the religious parties have had their strength over the last 20 years or so one other thing I would say on this point is that if you look at elections at least having some programmatic dimension was just to say people don't simply vote for people for client to list patronage reasons if people actually care about policy on issues of Islam and politics then the rise of the the TLP makes some sense because the MMA was no longer on the frontier as policy ideas had become sort of stale it also perhaps explains why within the MMA the JYF continues to do better than the Jamati Islami because the Jamati Islami is a very programmatic party they're very ideological they are defined by their ideas they're really invested in their ideas they care about their ideas the JYF has a programmatic element to what they do they're ideological but they also exist to as a patronage network to protect the madrasas and increasingly as a network to help tribal leaders in the tribal areas protect some of their old prerogatives the JYF has been on the forefront of opposing the changes to the tribal areas so it would make sense in this rubric that the JYF has done somewhat better than the Jamati Islami in this new competitive policy horizon my fourth and final point um is simply to remind all of us that electoral losers can still be policy winners and this is this is important to remember when you're looking at parties that do not sweep the electoral table and none of these religious parties did the MMA did not didn't do very well in this election but since 2002 they have arguably played a role and you could look at a number of occasions in which they have shifted the policy debate to the right they are in part the reason that they're no longer very interesting because they have moved the debate such that the mainstream parties the PTI has taken on a lot of their policy discourse space and agenda the TLP as the new set of policy entrepreneurs are arguably positioned to do the same thing now on domestic policy related to blasphemy and on on some aspects of foreign policy they might also we don't have a lot of survey data to look at this be positioned to shape the discourse on vigilantism because they have been very pro-vigilantism on issues related to blasphemy so I think in in that sense they're they're on that horizon the second example in which losers can still be policy winners the sectarian anti-shia groups like Sipasahaba and their party the Rahi Haq party did very poorly but they still have a lot of ties to the mainstream parties and they supported the PTI on balance in this election and the final thing to remember on this front is that politicians and thugs often get along really well because there's a mutual thing that can happen between politicians and thugs politicians can find thugs useful because a little muscle goes a long way thugs can find politicians useful because when you need protection you really need some sort of person you can go to who can can get you out of jail or make that FIR go away or whatever and so in in this environment we should remember that the accrual by these parties these religious parties of political standing and influence at the local level even if they lose the fact that they're out there campaigning that they become known to the bureaucracy that they have they gain some some social capital can help create networks of protection for the violent actors who with whom they're in a patronage a mutually beneficial patronage relationship we see this again and again i've looked at it with the juif and the the pro taliban groups but i think with the tlp and some other groups it it's also relevant and for that reason it's a great time to be looking at how these parties did at a granular local level to see who they might be protecting and how they might be rising in that context thanks thank you very much josh and now we'll talk to turn to sahar to discuss the military good morning everyone and thank you to usip for the opportunity so i think most of you know that you know the military for this election was accused by politicians human rights activists you know the media etc international and abroad of of interfering in the general elections and essentially in this particular election they interfered in two ways the first one was sort of targeting um the baksan muslim league navaz group especially navaz sharif which is something that yasser also discussed um in length in terms of the judiciary now the army and navaz sharif have always had a tumultuous relationship when navaz sharif was elected in 2013 this was his third time and now he's in jail for corruption now to be clear navaz sharif is corrupt so this is not you know saying that he's not but i think what's really interesting um of why he's currently in jail is that the case that sort of led to his court ruled ouster was brought by ranchan and and army officials and due to their cooperation now this is something that the army and ranchan both deny but this has been heavily reported especially in international media and in in english newspapers in baksan as well um the second way that the military interfered in the 2018 elections was basically by putting pressure on the media now pakistan has always been a very dangerous place for journalists to operate over the past 15 years 117 journalists have lost their lives and only three um have uh only three of cases have have gone to the courts for for investigation even though the number of journalists deaths has decreased um over the past few years they operate in a very contentious environment and they don't have a lot of security so that said um the the pakistani media basically especially you know on the ground journalists are are used to operating sort of you know in a stressful situation um but you know hamid haroon who's the chief executive of the of the dawn media group and also the president of the al- pakistan newspaper society wrote an op-ed in the washington post prior to the election in which he said that this time the interference in the media is different from past interference because the focus is the military wants to ensure that the media does not cover the central political issue facing pakistan which is the power struggle between the civilian leadership and the military establishment um and actually there are several examples of this i mean before the election in april geo news which is a large cable news network was forced to be off the air because they were seeming to be more pro-navast sheriff it was only direct negotiations between geo officials and army officials that led to them getting back on the air dawn newspaper has complained of their distributors being harassed by army officials and they've seen an impact and especially in various rural areas of their um newspapers being not not being distributed as as they should be but um you know the the military interfering the media is not just a 2018 thing this has been going on for several years now um and for those of you who especially do follow the military um it almost seems redundant to say that the military interferes because they interfere in almost everything related to pakistan but um the example i like to give that showcases how the military has been going after the media is the case of the article that siril al-maida wrote in october 2016 now this was an article um he's a very well known well-regarded journalist and columnist of dawn and in this new story um he reported that there was a meeting between civilian leaders and the military leadership under the um navash sherryf administration um and when they were talking about curbing militancy in pakistan um shabash sherryf was the chief minister of banjab at the time you know expressed almost an annoyance or really a concern um and he told the military that anytime that the civilian law enforcement organizations arrest certain members of certain militant groups the army forces them to free them um and this is something that's really bad for pakistan domestically for domestic political stability and it also harms pakistan's international reputation now when this story broke um everybody who was in the meeting basically denied denied it right but it was the military that basically went to dawn and wanted to wanted them to retract the story dawn which i think did a good thing and they basically refused which ended up you know with siril al-maida on the exit control list for a few weeks he's he's been off of it since but the reason why i give this example is because it shows a very good example of sort of the military's hysteria surrounded by their image over the past few years they have been very carefully constructing discourse constructing their image as as a savior of pakistan and as a protector um of its territory and its national identity um and that and so that was sort of the 2018 election showcase of of how the militaries interfered in the media now the bigger question i think always is why does pakistan's military interfere in the political system mainly i mean i think it's because it it can um and it also it it wants to because over the past 71 years it pakistan has experienced four military coups now this has put the military in a unique position where it has slowly been able to gain um political power and economic power as well um and so now after 71 years the military sort of invested in the economy is invested in the in the political society and it's a power they don't want to let go now what do i what do i mean by they're economically powerful um so the pakistani army right owns farms plastic factories security guard companies vocational training centers right the army um the fawji foundation is one of the largest conglomerates in pakistan which is also owned by the army and is heavily involved in agriculture particularly in the fertilizer sector they also make cereal and cheese which is delicious but you know they shouldn't i think not be making cheese um the army welfare trust um you know owns commercial but which is also owned by the army um they own commercial banks fish farms sugar and rice mills and pharmaceutical companies now the army is not the only part of the military establishment that's involved in this so the air force owns the shaheen foundation is owned by the air force and the peria foundation is owned by the navy both foundations are heavily involved in real estate and and also in various sectors of the economy so um basically in 2007 which is dated but just to give you an example of this in 2007 23 percent of the assets of the corporate sector were owned by the fawji foundation and the army welfare trust now that number may have shifted somewhat over time but i think it's important to note two things first of course the fawji foundation and the army welfare trust are not the only ones that are operating in the agricultural sector there are a lot of non-military um corporations like um the fatma group and angrow that also operate but i think what makes this interesting is the opaqueness surrounded by the companies owned by the trust and the foundation which makes researching just the the reach that the military has in various sectors of the economy very difficult to determine now in addition to being heavily involved in the economy um the military establishment is is also dominant it also dominates national security and foreign policy of of pakistan now one prime example of this is sort of the use um and sponsorship of militant groups over over several over several years especially militant groups operating in indian administered kashmid and in afghanistan now it is important to understand that pakistan's military's use of militants is um has a long history and pakistan is not the only country to use non-state violent actors for political gain russia iran so the arabia the united states there are various countries who have used militant groups as proxy so pakistan's not alone or unique also the military's capacity for sponsoring militant groups was bolstered by the united states during the cold war when the cia colluded with the iside to form the afghanistan majahedin to fight the soviets so since the end of the cold war and zal haq's death in 1988 the us has tended to favor the military they prefer working with military leaders because they are professional um they have bureaucratic predictability um and so you know they they seem to be less corrupt in the civilian side the corruption pakistan is very relative um so you know especially when it comes to counterterrorism the us side has has wanted to work with the military um one interesting tidbit which um when i found i thought was very interesting was that on the way to attending um haq's funeral zal haq's funeral the secretary of state george george schultz under secretary of state of political affairs michael armacost an assistant secretary of defense for international security with your armatage and charlie wilson a representative from texas they devised a u.s strategy in which they basically decided that they would back the u.s military and intelligence agencies and also provide rhetorical support to domestic developments and external affairs i see some eyebrows being raised i do have a citation i can talk about um finally and this is an issue that i've sort of extensively done research on in my dissertation and and beyond has been how the military has been using the judiciary as a cover um so this goes back to 2014 when after the army public school attack that claimed 130 children um and that was conducted by the teri qatar iban pakistan um the shireef government and um the army chief of staff at the time raheel sherry you've got together to create a national action plan which i think all of you are are well aware of part of that national action plan was to create military courts and these military courts basically determined that civilians who are charged with terrorism will be charged will be tried in a in a military court now in the past um related to terrorism in the past the supreme court has always struck down military courts military courts formed by both civilian leaders and military and military dictatorships but in this case the parliament passed an amendment called the 21st amendment that basically took away the separation of powers between the judiciary executive and the legislative branch and said that this separation of power does not exist for those that have been charged with terrorism what this basically means is that a non-military person a civilian who's been charged with terrorism is now subjected to court-martial laws and in this way the military has sort of maintained control over who um which jet black militants um you know get get tried and and are put in jail um which seems counterproductive when you think about if the military is in charge of sponsoring some groups then then why are they essentially um responsible for um putting some of these militants in in jail um now what does this mean for imran khan you know this is imran khan's first time as as prime minister um at my time at kato a few people have always asked me what do you think how imran khan what is his foreign policy and i always tell them i don't know i don't have a crystal ball i will say this that his first victory speech um you know he took a very brick and solitary tone um you know with regards to china for example he said that you know the china pakistan economic corridor has been good for pakistan it's elevated 700 million people out of poverty this is is different from the campaign rhetoric that he maintained which was that you know cpec has bad and and navash rief and the military both get you know kickbacks from it so you know and with iran he's expressed improving um relationships same with india same with the united states with avalanistan he even said that he would like open borders similar to the e u so his tone was was reconciled um was you know about reconciling pakistan's um regional relationships now what does this mean for the military and what kind of connection does imran khan have with the military this is unclear so far he's been very careful about not saying anything anti-military or really pro-military which gives the impression that he doesn't want to step on on their toes when it comes to national security and foreign policy which is a realm that the military has wanted to maintain control in um i would like to end with a with a hopeful note though um while i tend to focus on pakistan's civil military imbalance and um its effect on the state's national security and counter-terrorism efforts i do remain cautiously optimistic um this is the first time imran khan is ruling and i think that that even if he accomplishes five percent of what he says that would be good for pakistan and and you know a stable pakistan i think is in everybody's interests um and i hope that one day i'm speaking at a panel where we can talk about how pakistan has overcome its civil military imbalance and how magically the military is now under civilian rule i don't think it will be anytime soon but um i do think we might be closer than we were say 20 years ago thank you thank you so much sehar and finally we will turn to nila fir who will be giving us an overview of the election violence both before and during the elections great thank you so much um so i'm very excited to be here among a truly wonderful group of pakistan scholars and i just wanted to echo josh that it's really refreshing to be doing a deep dive into the elections and examining what they might mean for the future of the country so thanks usip for hosting this event so as the last presentation of the day i'll be speaking about political and electoral violence and i want to be clear at the outset that by this i mean both violence that occurs before and during the election with the intent of affecting the outcome of the election but i also mean violence that is carried out by political and democratic actors um which might occur in the months or years preceding the elections and this is important because if this violence is intended to shore up support for the parties or if it helps increase the resource base of these political parties then it's worth discussing um in this context and of course exposure to violence can and does affect political behavior and voting behavior and so i'll be discussing this as well and then finally i'll also focus on the role of political parties and politicians in inciting violence um and engaging in hate-based rhetoric my talk today is based both on qualitative field work that i carried out in may and june of this year so prior to the elections as well as a survey that was conducted by myself and michelle mollick who's a phd candidate at stanford and unfortunately wasn't able to be here today and the survey was carried out among approximately 1800 individuals in carachi a site of much political violence in the past um it was carried out again just in the month right before the election so june 26th till july 24th of this year so um let's just to give you a recap of the actual violence that took place this time around um the 2018 elections actually got off to a relatively peaceful start and i was here at usip in june and we were actually talking amongst us that it had been um relatively surprising but good to see that the elections thus far hadn't seen the same type of violence that we saw in 2013 this continued to be the case but just a few days afterwards there was a very large suicide attack in balochistan province in mustung which took the life of approximately 150 people with another 200 individuals that were injured so this is one of the deadliest attacks that has taken place in the country at all and among those that was killed was an electoral candidate sarajasani who's also the brother of the former chief minister of balochistan province and then earlier we had seen that an awami national party in p leader haroon balor was killed in a suicide bombing during a party meeting in peshawar um a convoy of the religious political party then with the head of majeste amal mma was also targeted resulting in approximately i think it was four people dead so then the violence continued on election day itself um at least 31 people were killed once again the largest attack occurred in balochistan in korea um and then we saw a number of local level brawls or incidents occur so there were allegations for example that a pti candidate um for provincial assembly assaulted or beat up police officers um there was also um reports that were filed by police in banu also in kp province against a former kp chief minister for forcibly entering a woman's polling station so we had a number of incidents where party members and supporters were injured and engaged in local level um incidents throughout the country so in total according to the bachsan institute for peace studies approximately 230 people lost their lives and over 400 were injured in 22 reported incidents in july 2018 13 of these hit political leaders and election related targets directly so what do we make of these figures well of course some level of election violence is common in bachsan elections um and these numbers nowhere near reached that amount of violence that we saw in 2013 um there were also qualitatively different so violence in 2013 disproportionately targeted secular political parties particularly the a and p and the pvp and they were carried out primarily by the bachsan thaliban so the same institution the bachsan institute of peace studies suggested that a total of 148 terrorist attacks were reported across bachsan between january and may 2013 um so 148 compared to 22 and these targeted political leaders worker is election candidates etc um but what's important to note and i want to emphasize that this that um this election violence or the number of electoral incidents that i'm talking about i think underestimates and understates the intertwined nature of democratic politics and violence in the country um so elections election scholars across many developing countries in the world often distinguish between two types of violence related to elections so the more obvious one is coercive violence which targets opposition voters in an effort to uh dampen opposition voter turnout or have voters vote in a particular way and of course also targeting opposition political leaders and political parties directly to prevent them from campaigning effectively etc but in addition to these more blatant types of violence um we have what's often referred to as persuasive or polarizing violence which is meant to create fear of another right so the other and often it's based on identity cleavages or identity lines and the purpose of this violence is to polarize constituencies by instigating intergroup conflict so steven wilkinson talks about what are called ethnic wedge issues and how parties seek to highlight these ethnic wedge issues in an effort to mobilize voters to vote for their co-ethnics versus other political parties so this increases the salience of one's own ethnicity and brings voters to the group who's making an ethnic appeal so this has been the case in karachi for the last few decades where heightened ethnic relations certainly determine or are a key determinant of political behavior and voting decisions this time around because of the paramilitary rangers operation against karachi we saw a different dynamic and i'll turn to that in a second but what i do want to emphasize here is that we are seeing similar um identity cleavages becoming salient when we look at what josh talked about so the increase and the increasing space that's being provided to groups like that the helike lebec the milley muslim league the helesun et al jamath which is the anti-shia party so these elections certainly provided more space to these parties allowing them to campaign freely and these campaigns were often on the basis of intolerance and inciting hatred and in many cases violence towards religious minorities so the tlp is not an armed group did not originate from an armed group that's different from the milley muslim league which is thought to be linked to the let but it hasn't shied away from the incitement of violence either so in 2018 one of its members carried out an assassination attempt against a federal minister and obviously as josh mentioned its originating point was support for the murder of salman fassir in election rallies as supporters have shouted hang them hang them as they're afraid to refer to blasphemers so this is an important landscape of violence and politics that um pre that was prevalent in poxson prior to the elections and so my colleague and i were interested in carrying out a survey to look at what the effects of exposure to violence are or can be on political behavior and what the effect of campaigning on identity lines might have on prejudice and relations between ethnic communities so we chose karachi as a site um primarily because of the history of identity-based conflict in karachi um so as i have started to indicate this time around because of the campaign against the mutahedda kambi movement the last few years in karachi we've seen relative levels of calm certainly lower levels of violence if you speak with a lot of people in karachi they'll agree that um crime rates violence rates have decreased i will say that karachi also saw a significant decrease in election turnout and so whatever people make of the rangers operation and i think we can all be excited about a decrease in violence it's also important to note that this also was accompanied by a disenfranchisement of a certain segment of voters right so i think the statistics are 40 percent voter turnout in 2018 compared to 55 percent in 2013 um and i haven't been had the time to do like a deep dive into the numbers but i would guess that a large percentage of these are former mqm supporters um and mohatchers and i'm happy to talk about this more it has to do with the splintering of the mqm as well as um the boycott announced by al-thafizan um so perhaps not a direct result of the rangers operation but certainly related to the rangers operation okay so then turning to our survey results so um we as i mentioned we're interested in looking at the impact that exposure to violence has on political behavior um and so we might expect that if someone is exposed to violence they can have one of two possible reactions right so you may choose to disengage from the political process or you might indeed um engage further um and either way it may affect who you choose to vote for your faith in the process overall etc so we in our sample of 1800 people in karachi um we found that a relatively high number had some exposure to violence so 32 percent of our sample said that um they had either personally experienced violence had a family member who who was exposed to violence or witnessed a violence attack themselves so this sample we found did depict significant differences on political behavior and political views than the sample that was not exposed to violence so particularly we found that those individuals who were exposed to violence were less likely to believe that the elections were free and fair more likely to expect violence um to take place during the elections and also more likely to fear violence during the elections however these individuals were not less likely to turn out to vote and they were actually significantly more likely to be interested in politics or state their interest in politics but the picture becomes more bleak when you separate out who the respondents noted was the perpetrator of the violence so obviously karachi has criminal violence as well it's often hard to distinguish political and criminal and ethnic violence in karachi but we asked individuals who they thought the perpetrators of the violent act to which they had been exposed were and we found again higher numbers than i had expected personally so among those who had personally experienced victimization which was 340 people in our data set 36 percent identified criminals but another 15 percent identified militant groups 13 percent identified political parties and 14 percent identified police or security agencies and this subset of people were less likely to vote which is important because and it's perhaps intuitive that if you have been if you have faced violence carried out by political and so-called democratic actors then you may fear yourself to be more disengaged from the political process so what can we do with this from a policymaker perspective well one approach which was implemented during the 2018 elections was to station rangers again the paramilitary force at polling stations however our data shows that those exposed to violence were actually significantly less likely to think that the rangers at polling stations make elections more free or fair or more secure so precisely those folk who are more likely to need security are also less likely to think that the type of security being provided is a good thing so we need to think of alternatives and if you thought the police was an alternative well the rangers among overall our samples 78 percent believe that the presence of the rangers would ensure a safe and secure election of course this was lower for people who were exposed to violence but overall only 34 percent felt that way about the police so the police is largely distrusted in karate so I'm just going to end by saying that this data is relevant to us because it makes the space that's provided to actors like the TLP and MML ASWJ etc even more pressing because if we continue to provide space to or to political parties that campaign on the basis of exclusion or incite hatred and violence and so on then we may be in for further disenfranchisement of minority rights or minority voters who realize that they may not want to partake in a process which they deemed to be neither free nor fair nor secure and might be putting themselves at risk because of violence and also I mean I mentioned the TLP and all of these actors because they're the groups that have attracted a lot of attention but you know the MQM is not gone I think it'll be here to stay it'll be back I'm pretty sure of that so we also have to think about without disenfranchising Mojhajir voters further how to think about ethnic politics and the violence that accompanies that. Thank you so much Nila for and thank you to all our panelists I think they've raised some very important issues and painted what is a very complex picture that you know outlines the context for these elections and going forward for politics we're going to open it up for discussion I ask that everyone use the microphone so that folks on the webcast can hear you please state your name and affiliation and keep your questions brief and we'll take a couple questions and then feel free to you know specify which panelist or panelists you'd like to answer. Thanks to one of the U.S.A.P. So one question for Josh so by elections do you think that the religious political parties are going to take advantage of the by elections especially I don't know if there's been an analysis overlaying where they people thought the vote was close and that they drew enough votes to come into second but I'd be interested in your take on where where religious political parties especially TLP could potentially gain further seats in the by elections next month I think they're scheduled for and for Yasser on the judiciary so I think you said 82,000 82 hundred thousand that'd be a lot tribunal cases for for the election has the changes in the election law do you think that these this means that these will be disposed much faster than we saw in 2013 or are they working under the same framework from 2013 my name is Mukhi Muhammad and I just wanted to add a few things to Sarah's thing if it's okay our military sorry I'm sorry did I okay sir I just wanted to add that our Pakistan army they do make nice cakes as well and it's under the banner of wings bakery and secondly they also rule the cantaloupe boards in order to govern certain urban areas thirdly they provide the military secretary to the prime minister which accompanies him all the time thank you okay thank you please so I've got a question for Yasser and Sahar which is about institutional coherence so it's sort of consensus that you know it's the weakness of parties as institutions that creates you know a relative imbalance with compared to strong institutions like the military now I'm curious about the coherence of these as institutions in in making decisions about political intervention so I mean there have been military dictatorships where decision making is concentrated in the hands of a single person right the extent to which they you know particularly you know dictators so I'm I'm interested in where you think how you think institutional coherence plays into decision making so for example in the courts like how is you know is it the chief justice versus the supreme court versus the Islamabad High Court versus the Lahore High Court how is political preferences aggregated within these institutions and similarly like for example you know with the military what extent are they aggregating political opinion from the jawan right the enlisted man upwards versus uh playing you know versus considerations of the military's institutional popularity with the public and I'm really interested in similarly in the judiciary right uh are they paying attention how do they reconcile the tensions between maintaining the judiciary's popularity uh with the national public versus the political needs of the members of the judiciary um and my question for Josh is about the nature of denominational diversity and voter appeal most of the I tend not to think of them as Islamic parties but rather denominational parties because almost all all of them represent a particular denomination so to what extent do you see um success or rather at this time what do you see as the most successful party in appealing across denominational uh boundaries to voters right so you know for example do you I'm curious even anecdotally the extent to which you see LeBike's ability to attract non-borelvy voters by pushing um you know Namuzi Ras al-Athor you know uh or for example the Ali Sunith Wajamat's ability to attract non-debandy voters um or even the Jui's attempt to do the same thanks thanks could we get your name and oh sorry I'm Johan um I'm at the School of Oriental and African Studies I'm a PhD candidate thank you um it looks like we have four questions two here two there so why don't we take uh those first thanks those are both great questions uh with respect to bi-elections which are like are like special elections in the United States off-cycle elections to fill a seat uh I don't I don't pay a lot of attention to them in you know I think if a bi-election happens before a general election people look at it as a harbinger of of the of the national mood usually improperly because people tend to flood the zone and focus a lot of money and attention on on an election whose particularities might not reflect the the general electoral dynamics and when there's a bi-election after a general election um you know parties are still going to try to all flood the zone and gain advantage but I think it's only really consequential when you have either a provincial or a national parliament that is in some kind of precarious balance in which a few seats could tip um some sort of coalitional behavior and I don't think that is going to be true in this case so it will be interesting but I think it will really be interesting at a very local level as to who's able to um you know who's able to to bring a little bit more energy but there's so much so much focus on those that I'm I'm very wary of extracting any um extrapolate any any broad observations uh the question about denominational parties I tend not to see them as denominational they they are denominational to the extent that they have an orientation right but they're not denominational um to the extent that um that they just recruit on that basis I mean the jyf is dayo bundy but a lot of people in pakistan are dayo bundy a lot of politicians are dayo bundy is the jyf is distinct I think yeah not just in it's dayo bundy tradition but in the sort of social class geographic domain some of the history of who it brings into leadership and how the jibadi islami would like to think that they are above denominational politics right and um denominational categories and of course they're not they're their own denomination of sorts but they have recruited beyond that their peculiar non-denomination denomination over the years you know I think you could ask the question which which parties are at broader best at uh at capturing voters across these distinctions um and you know I haven't looked at the national data on this I don't think it would be these small parties we're talking about I don't think it would be the ppp um uh I don't know between the the pmln and the pti kind of what those breakdowns are like because we don't have much data apart from very anecdotal data on people's musklicks and their sort of broader um more narrow affiliations but that's a very interesting research project to see to what extent uh those breakdowns can be understood and to what extent their discourse tries to target certain groups which we see more a little more clearly with the ppp and some of the you know cryptoshea rhetoric that they use and their rallies there are ways to identify I think who they're targeting it's a little less clear uh with some of the other parties how they do that great um uh Yasser Ansar do you want to answer I think there's a weakness of the institutional coherence question and then the judiciary question as well so I'll first address the election tribunal question that you mentioned I think um uh so from what I understand it doesn't bode well for these cases being decided quickly first of all they've appointed primitive predominantly serving judges rather than retired judges that means they have other responsibilities as well and that often means they're going to be delayed secondly there's already been a delay of I think several weeks in appointing the judges to this tribunal so the the allotment of time that was given for deciding these cases has already been cut into so they have a very easy excuse for extending the time so I really think we're going to see delays in the way the election tribunals deal with these cases even though they've been given a fixed amount of time to decide them in they'll be getting exemptions and furthermore what'll be interesting off that is which decisions by those tribunals get appealed how does appeals go will there be some interesting selectivity in which appeals make it to the high court and which don't so I can imagine some big cases taking some time to get decided and there are a lot of I think so the figure I was saying was I think over 80 any seats upon which petitions have been accepted by the electoral election tribunal so it's a pretty big group of national assembly seats upon which they're going to be you know pushing for some sort of you know taking on the challenges so yeah and as far as the institutional coherence question so this is a really interesting question for me um it's something I think about a lot and I think it's important to make one distinction between the military and the judiciary on this right one of the ways institutional coherence is sort of built up is through the hierarchy of an institution in which you come you're recruited you're socialized and you go up the ranks right and the military is a very much a careerist institute where you come from the bottom you move up the judiciary is not right the high court judges are primarily lawyers the electoral entries very few judges make it from the lower court to the high court most of your supreme court it almost exclusively judges from the bar right so these are mostly people who've come in much later in their careers from the legal community to the judgeship so you don't have the same mechanism of institutional coherence I think at that you find there as you find in the judiciary and I think that um what that means is therefore that the bar is really where you need to be looking to understand what are the ideas and norms that the judiciary is really um acting upon and to the question you asked about the interest of the court is most responsive to again that's the bar the you know through my research I found like this is the audience that judges care the most about this is the audience that you know they interact with a regular basis they make or break the reputations of judges and that's I think where one looks to understanding where the ideas and norms of the judiciary sort of form but but what that also comes and this also comes a very interesting debate going on right now with the judiciary because on the one hand there's there's definitely support for the digitalization that the judiciary is carrying out within the bar for one obvious reason it means more cases for them it means more issues for them to take a claim on and speak you know and be engaged with right now so of course there's a professional interest in why they would do this but also it reflects this idea that the bar today has of being the vanguard of middle of of the public interest right they are then that's sort of that's very means that's been transmitted and translated into the judiciary's own agenda but there's also this concern about centralization of authority and now the bar is getting very skeptical of the fact that in taking on more issues than judicializing them the courts are centralizing the authority by which they decide what issues should or should not be judicialized and specifically the chief justice so the chief justice's office now has authority like you know you wouldn't believe right it's picking up cases it's picking up issues it's you know deciding all but it's coming from the chief justice's office and what bar leaders are pointing out is that 1843 the power in which they take on these cases is not restricted to the chief justice it is a power that's supposed to be exercised by the whole supreme court yet the chief justice is almost exclusively exercising prerogative on this power and what this is one of the reasons is because there aren't some judges in the supreme court who don't agree with the way in which the supreme esokimusar is exercising and using this power and they are being silenced or pushed out chief justice dos muhammad Khan was one of the judges who got you know he didn't get out he didn't even go for supreme court reference because he was him esokimusar do not see eye to eye earlier on the current chief election commission justice sardar raza he was also not happy with the way if the heart show they use this power so there is dissent there and what's important is where the bar is more free to openly express this dissent it is just showing and critiquing the dissent the way the chief justice is centralizing authority and calling for more rules to be created in the way in which the court exercises bars under 1843 so the sin high court bar the karachi bar they are very much there's been a lot of conversation and protest about the way in which the chief justice is using his power and he's he's suffering a lot of reputational problems in sin right now but on had in Punjab where he seems to have very close relationships with the bar leadership there's relative silence but bar leaders i've talked to are like internally they're questioning what's happening right now it's just difficult to really express that dissent because he's using this power because also again the power centralization of authority is the use of the contempt of court power right and he can use that against lawyers who speak out to openly against him to further it increases centralization of authority but i think that's going to be the question coming up now where will the centralization of authority by the chief justice stop when will rules start being formed about how 1843 is exercised and i think that conversation probably is going to start in a big way once sarkandis are steps down so just to clarify when you say at the bar do you mean it in a sort of a more in a general sense of you know lawyers who have the right to practice in the high courts or do you actually specifically mean the bar associations so all the lawyers in the high courts are members of bar associations right that's almost all of them have to be and they add it's a very powerful union it's like a union right the bar association so i guess what they meant is like do you mean who's more powerful here like the collective or the leadership of the bar associations i guess okay so that's i think i think that's a really interesting dynamic within and that varies from bar association bar associate but as they become bigger i think the leadership gets stronger right because leadership is developing more mechanisms of patronage to coordinate the actions of the bar in sort of reflecting and pushing their agenda vis-a-vis the courts and vis-a-vis other political actors and so i think you're seeing very powerful bar leaders starting to coordinate activities across all bar associations in the country and that that's something that's only started recently but is increasingly i think there is a lot of bar you know leadership power the bar at the leadership level but one of the key ways in which it operates is its ability to get the rank and file behind them right and so that's that's what the lawyers moment was all about right we have this incredibly potent tool of bringing the rank and file behind us to challenge the general masharaf and we can do it faster than anybody else can because they're already all you know they're already very directly answerable to us so across the country right it's a very quick national mobilization bar leaders can do so i think i think as they grow bigger the bar leaders get stronger yes did you want to comment on sure really briefly about the institutional coherence of the military i mean i think over time because the military has such a unique power i think the military leadership has decided that it doesn't really need to do a coup in order to remain influential in the past they would need to do a coup to be in power now considering the 21st amendment and sort of how their powers have increased in counterterrorism when you think about how they have they've been censoring the media even how some political parties i mean nabash Sharif essentially had gone off gone against the military when he wanted to reconcile with india and how that ended up for him so i think the military very much is fine with almost this facade of civilian leadership and and behind the scenes they want to maintain power over national security and and foreign policy now this is an image that they have also carefully created over the past several years the ispr which is sort of the pr wing of the military at least over the past seven eight years they have been carefully constructing this discourse of how the chief of army staff is really the savior of pakistan's territory and national security how raheel sharif essentially um he was um i think you know personalities matter too of the chief of army staffs right i mean uh berbez qayani seemed to be a lot more quieter um and he wanted to sort of be behind the scenes raheel sharif was very much okay with billboards you know across the highway saying i am the guy who will save everybody from you know from from india's threat so i think that there's that there's almost a you know a unique consensus in the leadership that they don't need to do a coup i think what's also interesting is and this is a study i'd wanted to mention in my comments but had decided not to was um just recently there have been three scholars that have collected open source data on backgrounds careers and post retirement activities of post 1971 core commanders and director generals of the isi which is the premier intelligence agency and they found that while former core commanders and director generals they don't contest elections they don't really join political parties they all at some point joined the government and they very much are are you know take really big positions in in state-owned institutions and military-run corporations and and because of the bauxite military is a professional military it has bureaucratic predictability and so because of that mindset um and when they enter sort of the public and private sphere um they very much maintain control over civil institutions as well and so i think the way the military's power it's very hard a lot of it is sort of behind the scenes power is something you have to observe the trends of um and of course i would i would argue a lot of you know anybody at ispr would say no no no we never wanted to do a coup in the first place every coup that's happened has been because of necessity so i think with the military it's harder to understand the institutional coherence that exists but it does exist a lot more than say the judiciary or any other institution thank you um i think we have one question here did you go ahead hi um i'm heather over at georgetown you know um i was just um nail for your in your comments i wanted to kind of turn this to um the ethnic and violence sort of part of this because my earlier comment was kind of optimistic and now i'm back into pessimism um you're right the military is operating the background it's found that you know that's a much more powerful position i'm also finding it really hard to reconcile the kinds of assassinations we've seen we've seen the assassination of siraj reisani as you brought up who was part of the beloch stan awami party which was allegedly pro-establishment and you've seen the assassination of haroon belor who comes from a long line of kind of and mildly anti-establishment most importantly anti-taliban and you're also seeing the decimation of muhajir and to some extent sindhi leadership in sin than karachi what does this mean for the future of the ethnic parties the way we thought about them in the 80s and 90s because there was still this idea that somebody like the mqm could be both secular and be ethnically sort of driven same with the a and p right and these are on the back foot now because of these two seemingly you know and the forces that should not really be working in the same direction but they are which is the pakistan military and the pakistan taliban right they're both being sort of squashed in between these two and then the next question is what about the emergent pashtun leadership things like the pashtun tahafu movement that is just coming up mosindabad and ali wasid win in wasidistan in in a way that we know we not only did we know that they had huge groundswell support because of the movement but we didn't know if they'd make it out alive right and we still don't know what the future of their security is given that judiciary is now pulling back security for politicians what would persuade the army to take more of an interest in the security of political leadership this is a real issue we are losing people who have a base in society can we really see this you know pakistan moving ahead democratically if politicians are not allowed to just basically like exist right so i wonder what how you would sort of tie that into the kind of ethnic map or the ethnic story that we have a pakistani democracy thank you i am andrew yeah andrew wilder usip again thanks for another great set of presentations um a question for josh uh when i was doing my research again many decades ago focusing on the pun job you know the conclusion for me was one of the you know most important factors of forming influencing voting behavior was the perception of who's going to win and so for that reason i often cautioned against determining the popularity of religious parties based on their voting behavior because in the first pass the post system they were never perceived to win so why waste your vote for them and i gave the example of the akhet belouche who was then the naib amir of yamata slimy in 1988 i think he won contested from an urban constituency of lahore and maybe won eight or nine thousand votes uh didn't win the seat um the next year in 1990 on the iji coalition when viewed to be military backed not just viewed to be but was military backed and so the perception was it was going to do well he got 90 000 votes and won the seat um and so i guess to what that was back then i'm sort of wondering now do you think those same dynamics are at play and so is again religious parties also one factor why they aren't doing terribly well because they're not expected to win um and if they they were part of a coalition say like with mma um would you see them perform better um i think we'll take two more first here at the table and then ask them in the back share your firstly formally of the international crisis group currently unafiliated my question is for yasir i appreciate and agree with your uh uh observation about the judiciary's audience and who they're playing to uh but that said the restoration of the judiciary's credibility as an institution began with the missing person issue uh in the late year in the final years of the musher of regime and i agree that um they're trying not to take on the military establishment that is usually the one disappearing these people um so it certainly lost a lot of momentum uh since then but a couple of notable things happened in the run-up to the election one is the pashtun tahafa's movement that iran just referred to that brought missing persons back to sort of the central to the center of the national conversation secondly related to that we've seen reforms to fata where part of that is the judiciary's the extension of the judiciary's jurisdiction to fata so my question is just what with with these developments is there a prospect that will come full circle uh and the judiciary will come back to those um you know the issue of fundamental rights and if not what will it take yeah if you can come up to a mic that would be great so folks can hear you hi guys thanks for the great panel i have a question for each of you uh so for yasir and and if you can state your name and affiliation sorry i'm esenbar i teach at gmu george mason uh my question for yasir and sahar is how much coordination do you think there was between the judiciary and the army before the election uh i have two questions for josh one following on yohan's great question uh maybe asked in a different way is there a place for a non-denominational religious party in pakistan's electoral future because an alternative theory to the data that you presented which is like the tlp is rising the jui is elbuing ji out of you know the mma is that you've got to be a denominational party to get votes and you can't be sort of one of these overarching ji type so is there a future for a ji type party uh and sort of secondarily why in your opinion is there no shia party in pakistan uh and then for elufer uh specifically on the mqm in karachi so obviously it you know the mqm was sort of you know pretty hurt in the 20 in the most recent elections and that maybe i want your thoughts on sort of three different theories of why that happened one is uh sort of the splintering at the top level right like one is this violent story that you're talking about the unit unit in charge sector in charge the sort of muscle the ranger argument and then one argument is this sort of plp picking up voters from this side and pti picking up voters from this side and so between those three arguments which would if any which one which one would you favor okay thank you very much i think we have a a rich list of questions here for all of you so um why don't we start at the top here with uh the ethnic violence and um the ethnic parties question elufer um those were a series of really interesting and important observations um so i have some thoughts i don't know if they'll answer your question exactly but um first is i just think it's interesting that there's nothing like new actors like the tlp and aswj for us to start to become a bit sympathetic to the old actors like the ji and mqm etc so not to again come across as like too much of a sympathizer of the mqm i mean it's very much responsible for a lot of violence in karachi etc but i do think that it's important um to pick up on this point that you made and that like a lot of parties are facing two sets and streams of attacks from the military and from militant groups and so these don't always overlap and sometimes they do and um i think that we all of us box sunny commentators and people who follow box on are really fascinated by the rise of the tlp and also with how the tlp is now responding like the fact that it continued the street protests etc and so one question i think that comes up or i've heard people ask is you know what is the relationship here between the military and the role that the groups like this are playing as spoilers maybe in line with the military's objectives and uh in some cases it seems like there's obviously like independent objectives and priorities etc um so i'm not i'm not to say that like you know these identity cleavages are replacing ethnic politics and i think that ethnic violence in karachi has been so deadly so in our survey um we were trying one of the we were exploring two questions and i should have mentioned that this was generously funded by usip so thanks for that but um so aside from exposure to violence we were looking to see if there were any interventions that could try and decrease prejudice between ethnic groups and um the sad answer because political scientists like to see results is that it's really hard to diminish prejudice between ethnic groups and the baseline levels of intolerance between groups is so incredibly high um and it's really hard again like our work wasn't trying to disentangle the direction of the causal arrow so whether or not political parties are creating this hatred or whether political parties are reflecting this hatred but as in most situations it's probably a little bit of both right so um all of that to say that um i think that ethnic politics as it has occurred under the mqm and a little bit the a and p etc um it wasn't a successful story in the 90s but it did um fulfill a lot of needs of a very important group of people and those needs exist and the mojhajars being unrepresented which is currently not all of them of course because a lot went to pta etc but for those who are feel like they are unrepresented and i really do think that the lack or the decrease in voter turnout is something that we should be concerned with right and so going forward we need to think about what the replacement for this is and um i met an mqm member um and subsequently after meeting him i also met an intelligence officer who apparently was concerned with my meeting with the mqm so but that's another story but the mqm official was telling me that um you know for now their plan is to lay low and i think um knowing mqm and how politically savvy it has been in the past it's likely to and already what it's done post elections you know it's going it's going to return um and what form that takes i guess we'll have to see um so that goes into essence question um i think i think it's going to end up being an atypical election for the mqm um i think we keep expecting to see the demise or the end of al-thafizan and i don't think we're really at that point where we're going to see it just yet so you know his call for boycott did have an effect um i i think um xerahman who's a journalist i respect a lot wrote this awesome article about the end of ethnic politics in karachi because of the role of the pti and winning votes i don't see that either i just i think there's something that happened that was a result of a lot of factors like delimitation the new census um uh obviously what happened with the mqm the fact that it didn't have a headquarters to work with and where is the a and p etc etc so i think we're going to kind of just like come back to some sort of parity um and i think we're gonna it's going to be more fractured but um i don't think it's going to be a continuation of the end of mqm and the rise of the pti or tlp or anything uh nil for did you have anything to say about the push tune the hafiz movement and security of political leaders oh um that's uh yeah i didn't write that down um i don't really have too much to say on that point i think um it's in it's just um again i think i'm just going back to this point of facing um two streams of attacks from both the military and the militants and with the ptm in particular i think this comes out a lot because it's been a very unpopular movement among the establishment and the powers that be and so it's i think really refreshing to see um its supporters when the seats that you mentioned um so we'll see again i the survey that we carried out in karate showed that a large percentage of people didn't know who the ptm were and i do i think this comes back to this question of whether or not i don't believe that a social media phenomenon i think that's overstating it but i also think perhaps the social media folk in this room have also overstated its grassroots level importance and especially in large swaths of the country so we should see how that ends up thank you um josh i think there are two questions for you one on how perceptions of who will win influence religious parties and then the place for non-denominational religious parties or why there is an issue a party thanks i just want to say something very briefly about the a and p uh it's very sad to see how they've been targeted but they've been targeted for quite some time and i tend to see their dysfunction in more pedestrian terms uh they've had you know decades of infighting their last season of governance wasn't perhaps the best um and they have struggled to figure out how to deal with the the new Pashtun nationalism and their place vis-a-vis the toughest movement and others so in many ways they're you know it's very cyclical with their success and their prominence in the frontier and we're we're certainly in a down cycle um you know andrew's question just reminds me of how much we don't know about voting behavior uh but i do think there's a lot of sort of anecdotal evidence that people do want to vote for winners and in patronage environments there's certainly a demand for that um and i think maybe a corollary to the anecdotal observation would be that uh people want to vote for winners and if they think that the army or some other establishment actor is trying to to push out uh incumbent organization um and is trying to use a small factional or religious party to do so people can often get a whiff of that right and so there's a bit of that in in 2002 with the mma um and i could imagine that as a future in a very localized way for the tlp people get a sense that you know because there have been clear examples where the military has publicly patronized the tlp um and could see them as a tool for sort of wedge politics but again there's just a lot we don't know about why people vote the way we do uh to essence two really good good questions uh it's hard for me in the near term to imagine a non-denominational religious party in part because the mainstream parties have taken over so much of the space the ideological space that parties like the gemati islami uh had long occupied the gemati islami cares about law the legalization islamization of the legal system and institutions and a lot of that has been that space has been captured um so a party could conceivably be in that same vein but much more dramatic uh put forward some policy proposals that were more of a stretch and recapture that frontier um but i i think if anyone's going to be creative in that space it's probably going to be one of the you know now we have three large quote national parties even though not all the early national it's more likely one of those parties will see uh uh sort of opportunity space in capturing that frontier uh than uh party like the ji the question of a shia party you know i've been looking at this in detail but i would imagine sort of um if i were a shia voter i would see the benefits of continuing to vote for the ppp to outweigh the benefits of voting for a shia party in most cases because you can try to get the same degree of protection that you would voting for a shia party but without the risk of retribution and there are several kinds of retribution one is that the person you vote into power in a shia party just gets hit by the sipis ahaba or somebody else um or that you'd rather be a crypto shia than a public shia uh member of the shia collective and so um you don't want to signal your own sectarian affiliation in the electoral process uh and so you vote for a party that says all the right things gives all the right signals has some of that rhetoric at the rally you know will protect you to the extent that they can but you don't identify yourselves in a way that makes you vulnerable so that would be my my guess as to why we've seen that kind of voting behavior um and we can talk more about what would it take to change that kind of voting behavior yeah i i met with them i'm aware of their operations and they have done very poorly in almost all their electoral contests and haven't been able to capture a mass base of the community that they've been trying to recruit from and part of you talk to the some of the voting population uh but you have you know only at times and in certain places they provide this logic of the the risks inherent in voting for a sectarian party if you're a minority uh seem in their mind to outweigh the benefits of doing so if you can gain some measure of of identification and protection from a larger political bloc thanks and i think um we're running out of time so the uh i think it's fitting that the last question uh yasser and sehar can answer is about coordination between the judiciary and the military i just would like to address the missing person's question quickly also yeah uh just because i think they they die in you know there's clearly a question about the military and what the judiciary's relationship is with that the institution and i think the missing person issue it's sort of the short answer i do think it'll come full circle the court will deal with it again but just as before when the court dealt with it with very little actual like results i think we would see a similar sort of cosmetic engagement with the issue repeat itself and the reason is because the courts always want to be the one institution that cares about missing person it's a it's an important claim for its post 2007 legitimacy that we're the only ones who took up this banner more than anybody else we set up the commission if the court showed they went out to bat for missing persons issues and so you know i think that issue will continue to hold for them i mean you know and i think they will want that status to remain and that reputation to be maintained but when they will pick up the issue more or less in the post army public school period this last three years it just wasn't something that the courts felt it just wasn't something the court would feel would be very popular with the groups who's you know popularity they cared about even bar associations i talked to leaders said we oppose for example the actions taken in the national action plan and the military courts but we actually didn't oppose them we knew we had to say we oppose them but we really didn't and there was this understanding that really at this point there was a consensus within the legal community also behind the secure aggressive securitization and in that kind of environment we can't imagine that the courts are going to really push themselves too aggressively on this issue but over time that you know that that's going to dissipate possibly and then we'll see the issue you know the courts pick up these cases where they challenge military security more than maybe they did before but again i think at best be cosmetic because it's always just been at best cosmetic yeah that's why i just mentioned the ptm because i think that is the new factor that's revived attention yeah it'll be interesting to see how durable and sustainable the ptm and then what impact it has on islam because you know things that happen in carachi but nobody can care but the military released over 300 people because of the ptm which 12 years of court hearings i don't think of this sure i agree and it'll be interesting to see what happens now because you know like javadek ball is ahead of the missing persons and in force disappearance commission and we know he is that because he's always been close with the military but at the same time when push came to shove in 2007 the military assumed they had his support but he didn't sign the pco because at that time he realized it was strategically wiser to go against the military so it really depends on when judges think based on what they want out of the system and what where they're trying to get their reputation and strength from or draw their strength from how they'll deal with the missing persons cases at that time so following javadek ball's fluctuations on this issue is an interesting way to understand where the court's going to lean at what point i think um and finally about the question of the uh as eson pointed out the coordination so you know we're outside sitting in you know Boston and dc so there's only so much of the internal mechanics that one can uh focus on but i still you know would like to venture some thoughts on it and i i think that first of all i don't think the court the courts have acted as a cover or a proxy for the military as some people would say i think there's definitely an alignment of interests in taking on you know navashreef and other institutions that doesn't mean that one is reducible to a proxy of the other right but at the same time i think where we see maybe coordination and it gets speculative is in the cases decided at the lower levels of judiciary so of the judicial system so nab cases uh anti narcotics fourths cases a nf cases and the reason is that's not should that shouldn't be too unexpected because you know the military has a presence in now the military has a presence in the a nf right so cases where like the effedrine case coming up that came up against harifa basi or the nab case against the vashreef they haven't filled case and the other ones are going to hear i think it's reasonable to speculate that there is some coordination going on they come from the upper judiciary and the military apply to those lower court and how they deal with these cases and there is space to imagine that that that coordination would be happening because both institutions have a direct influence on how these bureaucracies and the courts that are created by these bureaucracy deal with such cases so i think that level one sees coordination on yeah i agree with yasir in part i mean i don't think that there's some sort of secret meeting going on between top level judges and the military leadership but i mean i don't think the judiciary is a proxy of the military but i would disagree with yasir a little bit that i do think the military has strategically used the judiciary as a cover which has allowed not only an alignment of interest but to some extent some sort of coordination which perhaps is sort of like a it's accidental coordination not something that they saw and you see this especially in the realm of counterterrorism when you've had law enforcement agencies and the military try to curb militant groups operating within the country that harm baksan's interest that you know the secessionist movements which you know a lot about and i think that there's a lot more coordination and and you see this especially when you see so for my research i had read all the terrorism related course law turns out it's a lot and basically some of the bureaucratic routines that the judiciary has developed has always been that when it comes to countering terrorism they side with the military and one way they do that is to say it's the doctrine of necessity that under emergency we're going to let go of the separation of powers and excuse me then also i think what's interesting about the military and judiciary's relationship is that both institutions very much like to say that they are independent and that they want to each of them want to be i think to some extent be a savior of the country so the judiciary even though we all know that it's extremely corrupt and that lawyers take bribes and judges take bribes um any judge i interviewed and there are about 25 the judges and lawyers i interviewed for my research they all said the judiciary is independent right and and they all talked about the military as being the two independent organizations and bureaucracies that want to work in baksan's interest so i think that's also odd too how they both also advocate for each other um and just very briefly about the ptm movement right it's even though they ptm talked about the the military going after them the law enforcement agencies are very much part of this too and the police has been absolutely complicit in the military most of the dirty work of the military has been done by the police um the police is very much interested in militarizing and being more like the military in order to curb various movements and not provide protection to the politicians so i think to some extent whether or not the military will be whether or not the military can be used to provide security for the politicians i think we we see a turf war between the police and the military which just exists sort of in general when you talk about domestic security versus um international security in baksan thank you all so much for joining us i think we had a really interesting discussion and i'm pleased to join me in thanking all our great panelists here today