8 Flagrant Ways the U.S-Backed Government in Pakistan Is Subverting the Election
Pakistan was supposed to go to polls last year. The country’s constitution has five-year terms for both the national and provincial assemblies as well as for the post of the prime minister. When the former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government was toppled in a parliamentary coup backed by the Pakistani military and the U.S. State Department in 2022, it was only in its fourth year.
The charges against ousted prime minister Khan range from incoherent to absurd. He was charged with “exposing state secrets” for publicly discussing the contents of the secret cable that The Intercept reported on last year. He was slapped with a seven-year sentence for what the Supreme Court said was an invalid marriage. And he got 14 years for supposedly keeping state gifts without filing the proper paperwork or compensating the state, though all evidence suggests that he did so.
Since then, the Pakistani military has ruled from the shadows, trying to delay the inevitable elections while at the same time trying to ensure that the massively popular Khan and his party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, do not come back to power.
Inside Pakistan, the media is completely muzzled. Outside Pakistan, the upcoming elections are being called the “least credible in the country’s history and “more like a coronation” where the military is understood merely to be choosing a new civilian face for its rule. While the U.S. State Department has consistently said that it has not made a determination about the fairness of Pakistani elections, the events leading up to the elections have not gone unnoticed in Congress.
