Following on from my post from the other day on Pakistan, here’s an interesting piece in the CSM: Could Pakistan fall to extremists?

Of interest is the suggestion that Musharraf’s rule may be increasing the long-term odds of an Islamist regime, rather than protecting against it. To wit:

To maintain his rule, some Congressional democrats say, Musharraf has had to marginalize Pakistan’s largest parties, which are secular, and instead rely on religious parties to give him some patina of support. In doing so, however, Musharraf has suppressed the moderating elements of Pakistani society.

The shift comes as extremism in Pakistan has reached unprecedented levels during the past two years. For the first time, Taliban-linked militants have targeted government ministers and Army personnel in suicide bombings and ratcheted up violence in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province.

Yet Pakistani analysts overwhelmingly say that the best way to combat terrorism here is not with military force, but with a true democracy. Pakistan has been a democracy for 30 of the 60 years since it gained its independence. During those years, religious parties never won more than 12 percent of the vote in any election.

“As impressive and worrying as this total appears to some, the Islamist vote remains limited to slightly more than one-tenth of the electorate despite heavy manipulations in its favor by the state machinery,” writes Frédéric Grare in a 2024 report for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

[…]

Musharraf – like the three military rulers that preceded him – has relied on fringe religious parties.

These parties have deep grass-roots connections and formidable street power, making them a convenient political ally for military rulers, who otherwise would lack popular support bases of their own. In return, religious parties receive disproportionate influence.

“The first step to cleaning up extremists is to make sure extremists are marginalized,” says Samina Ahmed of the International Crisis Group’s office in Islamabad. “Musharraf is so dependent on them for propping up his political order.”

Worth noting:

The statistics play against common perceptions of Pakistan abroad. Some 70 percent of the population of Pakistan comes from the lowland areas of Punjab and upper Sindh, where cultural traditions and economic aspirations hew to those of moderate India. Likewise, more than 84 percent of the Army officer corps comes from Punjab and Sindh.

The whole piece is worth a read.