2018: Delivering more than the electoral count

• Watch for outside players

It’s understandable that the game of musical chairs in politics has got the ability to give rise to a new arrangement. Being a poor nation, yet rich in resources and a powerful and important actor on the world stage, there is lot at stake for all pursuing a share in the power-pie, come time for elections. When the stakes are high enough, the players must exert whatever it takes to be the power brokers the next time around. Some hope for a better representation in the national assembly but for some the target can be nothing short of premiership and they can go to any limit to achieve such a goal.

Election season in Pakistan has historically been plagued with accusations of foul play and money has always been pushing the mayor to the office, be it purely political circumstances or a dictatorship: in a dictatorship it’s both money and the metal (as in military arsenal) that produce a combined effect decisively. One cannot help mentioning actors like Shaukat Aziz here as a paradigm of such. But in elections under a democratic environment, the tug of war for each constituency is more of a battle ground where possibilities of protest over fairness of elections and subsequent actions and reactions of all parties involved have been known to cause havoc. Add to that the free flow of weapons that go side by side with the election culture, the electoral process has the tendency to deliver fairly more than just the electoral count.

The security situation during elections has also traditionally been a headache in Pakistan that has recently got upgraded to a migraine when you put the ISIS/Daesh factor in the mix that did not haunt the previous elections here. This becomes even more dangerous when ISIS seems to hold the weapon of all weapons up its sleeves: the ability to test the Shia-Sunni divide with new challenges. The writer cannot stay naïve or refrain from mentioning that extremist sectarian clerics do harbour some sympathy for the ISIS-led wave of terrorism. The Parachinar and Quetta terrorist attacks of June 2017 signify that terrorists have been successful in creating the perception amongst some to be working on sectarian grounds as the Shia were targeted in both these attacks at two different places, almost simultaneously. The terror acts were claimed by both the local affiliate of the Islamic State terror group and by Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA), a splinter group of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. The collusion between the local terrorists and their foreign companions can easily be seen here, and it can also be seen that they have been trying to validate themselves as working on sectarian lines to enter the ripe market of like-minded for human resource. ISIS breathes and lives on publicity for recruitment, and what better time for this than the long anticipated and potentially well covered event like “Elections 2018”.

The challenge of elections becomes even more serious when we consider that the masses have been trained by the leaders of the street politics to stage their protest on the roads in any way possible

There is no doomsday scenario as long as we are aware of the challenges, the flash-points and the triggering factors of terrorism. The damage control must start way before the elections by the security forces. The potential terror targets, and the sympathisers of ISIS in particular, and other terrorist factions must be monitored and penetrated for intelligence gathering. The fire-brand sectarian leaders with a track record of sectarian intolerance must already be approached and a reasonable sense of conduct must be conveyed earlier than elections. The intelligence sharing and necessary intelligence footprint must go beyond the borders not ignoring ISIS, beneficiaries in Afghanistan or across the globe.

While the political scene has been further embellished with the inclusion of Tahreek-e-Labbaik in the mix, the visitors in our neighbouring Afghanistan are worth keeping an eye on. America’s stay in Afghanistan is pointless in the sense that it has not been able to make much of an impact on the political or social engineering of the masses there and could also not get the kind of war booty it got from Iraq in terms of ‘oil contracts; but America is surely in a strategically suitable position when it comes to affecting Pak-China growing trade relations particularly CPEC. With a great lot of mercenaries of our own creating waiting in their wings there is a chance that many global actors will be gearing up to recruit some to their advantage using their proxies like ISIS. If Uncle Sam’s track record is to be trusted, its agencies will not lose an opportunity to put Pak-China growing economic partnership under serious security risks.

The challenge of elections becomes even more serious when we consider that the masses have been trained by the leaders of the street politics to stage their protest on the roads in any way possible. This may create opportunities for dollar jihadis for easy access to paradise with maximum head count included in their deeds. Also the perception has already been created that the elections will not survive rigging, come what may, which has enraged the political workers and has made them ready for protests even before the first vote has been cast. This has been facilitated by the migratory birds from Canada under Qadri’s patronage and also by the excessive dependence on social media for news. A political movement can be started, staged or can also be hijacked or inflated by the use of social media platforms like Facebook and Whatsapp. Who has the final say when it comes to the control of these social media networks? It’s again the unappeasable western visitors in Afghanistan, led by USA, whose agencies will have control over social media news in the background.

Waiting in Canada and UK, the cherished sons of the west, Qadri and Altaf Hussain, would be depending on these media genies and the protesting public to muster the strength for their street punch while they enjoy the protection of asylum or bullet proof cabins. On the other hand, ISIS will also be eying the elections and the dollar-backers of ISIS would also be waiting to test their monster unleash its powers in Pakistan after they have done the same in Syria and Iraq. While the local security situation must be under a watchful eye; because of them having a greater excess to resources, the imported “visionaries” (or molvis), the imported terror bands, our imported neighbours and the imported media platforms must be accounted for before the vote count starts otherwise the “Election Day” may provide with unprecedented “results”.