Hearing of the National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform - Pakistani Elections

Interview

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REP. VAN HOLLEN: Thank you, Mr. Tierney, and thank you for holding this series of hearings on Pakistan. I thank all our panelists, witnesses here today.

And I just want to start by looking at the context in which we find ourselves in right now in Pakistan. And I think we obviously need to look forward and anticipate what's going to happen after these elections. But it's also important to remind ourselves how we got here.

And we did get here, in large part, because the United States government, under the Bush administration, did not take action nearly early enough to put -- keep pressure on Pakistan to move in the direction of greater democratization, and essentially bought into Musharraf's argument that he was the only guy in Pakistan that was willing to stand up to the Taliban and be able to fight al-Qaeda.

When, in fact, as you pointed out, Mr. Schneider, his ability to stay in power was, in part, due to the fact that he had at least the tacit support of some of the extreme religious groups within Pakistan, and that they provided him his margin, in fact, for the majority. And if you looked at, sort of, the secular opposition, that they, in fact, represented a much greater threat, so to speak, to the Taliban and the extremists.

And what our policy did was reinforce Musharraf. And we, sort of, saw this in stark terms when Musharraf recently, instead of keeping his guns trained on al-Qaeda and the extremists, actually turned against the lawyers, and those fighting for democracy in the streets. And so we, sort of, saw in very vivid form, when push came to shove, where he saw some of the threats within Pakistan coming from.

So I do think we've got a lot of work to do dealing with the Pakistani public, in letting people know that we're on the side of democracy. Let the chips fall where they may. And clearly, his decision to remove the chief judge had everything to do with the face that they were about to rule that he could no longer serve -- he couldn't as president because of the constitutional limitations.

So given that we're in that situation, and we're going forward now with the elections, if the elections are not perceived to be fair; and given what you've all said with regard to the current judges, and the election overseers who are all supporters of Musharraf at this point, if it's not perceived to be fair, where does that leave the United States, and what shall we both be doing right now -- you've answered some of that, but looking to the future, what kind of scenario should we anticipate, and what kind of measures should be willing to take if we judge -- we, the United States government -- judge that the outcome was not fair?

MR. SCHNEIDER: Mr. Van Hollen, I'd say there are three things that we ought to do: First, as we've all said this morning, I think the most important thing in the immediate three weeks is to put as much pressure as we can -- verbally and in other ways -- on the government to do the right thing to make them as free and fair as they can, given the limited time available to us.

Once the election has been held, I think it's important that we work with political leadership within the country to do as much as possible to ensure that whatever the results of the election, we work with all interested parties to enhance the institutions of government themselves and not look at that election as the last word, but only really the beginning of an ongoing effort to try to put Pakistan on the right path. I think that's critical.

And then third, I think it's important for us to involve the international community as well. This shouldn't just be a bilateral experience. It's important for us to involve others as well -- in the region and around the world -- and add to that pressure on the Musharraf government and those responsible for making these decisions. But that all has to be done both in the short term and in a longer term in a concerted way and we can't afford to wait a day. It has to start now.

MR. DASCHLE: I would just add to that really one thing, I think, and that is that instead of the conditionality applying softly to 50 out of the 300, I think you should apply it to all 300 million. I think anything we provide thereafter should be clearly performance based in relation to going after Taliban fully -- not in a halfway manner. And that it should be based clearly on evidence that they have, in fact, taken significant steps to go after the Taliban leadership -- the core leadership -- throughout the country, as well as al Qaeda. I think that that is the minimum.

But clearly, we should be also looking for ways to strengthen our relationship with the rest of the political -- not just the political parties, but civil society as well: human rights groups, many of which have -- their leaders have been detained; the women's organizations. All of those that represent civil society we should be increasing our support for them. This is not going to remain -- even if this outcome of these elections is, as we believe, not going to be fair and free -- that is not going to be the future of Pakistan.

MR. GARRETT: If I could just add to that: We feel very strongly at IRI that we don't need to fear the outcome of any free and fair elections in the country, but we do need to be very concerned in the United States about what is to come, if it's seen as an American validation of a rigged election.

And as my fellow witnesses have said, I think an investment needs to be made -- a long-term investment -- in Pakistani civil society. We're seeing the students now stepping up for really one of the first times in some years, the lawyers and the political parties. But an investment needs to be made in developing those groups.

REP. VAN HOLLEN: Just to follow up on that, Mr. Garrett, in terms of the tools that are at your disposal in terms of the election monitoring, what kind of cooperation have you gotten? What resources do you have at your disposal? And at what point would you be in a position to give an assessment as to -- again, prior to the election -- as whether or not you thought you had the resources and tools available to actually make a fair judgment, because it gets to a point you just raised: We do not want to be in a position here of sort of certifying the fairness of an election, or suggesting we think it was fair, if in fact we're not in a position to do so and many in the country see it as unfair.

So what resources are at your disposal and at what point do you think that you'd be able to say that the election monitoring that is going to be put in place will be adequate to make a determination on the fairness of the election?

MR. GARRETT: The resources to date that we've been operating on were provided by the National Endowment for Democracy. They have been our only funding source in the country until very recently for this election when we did receive USAID and State Department money to conduct the election observation itself.

A 65-person observation delegation is fairly large; however, in a nation of 160 million people, tens of thousands of polling stations, you can see that won't go very far. That's why I think it's important that the work of our sister organization, National Democratic Institute, to train the political parties to try to get as many of their own observers there -- that's been very, very important for this.

There are Pakistani groups that are also domestic observers. As I understand it, as of today, they've still not been given credentials by the government allowing them -- although they're a very well- established NGO -- to go out and try to cover some of these polling stations on election day and record their findings. So there's one more thing that could be done: Encourage the government of Pakistan to allow its own domestic groups to participate in the election as monitors.

The resources for the future, as I say, I think we need to try to commit more to these very sectors and try to do that possibly through our USAID programs as opposed to simply through the Pakistani government.

REP. VAN HOLLEN: Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

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REP. VAN HOLLEN: Yes, just briefly, again, as we discussed earlier on, I think that the reason the Bush administration has been so slow to push Musharraf and others in Pakistan more quickly toward democratization has been this assertion made by Musharraf and essentially picked up by the Bush administration that he is the only guy standing in the way between the radical extremists taking over in Pakistan.

And as you pointed out, Mr. Schneider, in your testimony, if you look at some of the sort of basis of operation of al Qaeda, we are talking about places like Quetta, we're talking about Peshawar. We've -- also saw that the deal President Musharraf struck many months ago with the folks in the federally administered tribal areas where he essentially entered into a non-aggression pact, and according to the publicly announced portions of the National Intelligence Estimate here -- which, as you know, represents the consensus position of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies -- that led directly to an increase in Taliban strength and increased, sort of, sanctuary for al Qaeda-type elements.

So I think it's very important as we go forward here that people in the United States understand that Musharraf is not the bulwark against extremism in Pakistan. And, to the extent that you do not allow the political process to be more open, in fact, you strengthen the extremist element.

So I would just like all of you to suggest, if you were to have the sort of secular opposition win this election, and we were to continue to push Musharraf to more openness and more democratization in the process, how would that affect Pakistan policy with respect to the Taliban and the anti-al Qaeda effort? Would it hurt that effort, or would it strengthen it, or would it essentially represent -- (inaudible) --

MR. SCHNEIDER: I think it would definitely strengthen it. And there simply, as I said earlier, there would be no countervailing political pressures to try and go soft on the Taliban, because they're linked to the religious parties, in the case of Musharraf, that I support.

And so it seems to me that you're likely to see a much stronger, a unified civilian leadership in the parliament pressing for the military to take actions against the Taliban and al Qaeda. And both parties, both the PPP and the PMLN have stated in a coalition statement that they would go after al Qaeda and the Taliban terrorists.

MR. GARRETT: I agree. I think it would strengthen -- it would strengthen this struggle that their country and our country -- (off mike).

MR. DASCHLE: I think a lot of the government's actions, the repressive actions, have emboldened the extremist elements within the country and given them all the more empowerment in these regions outside of the larger cities. And I can't think of a better antidote to that than to empower the opposition, to give them an opportunity to work these areas and to say that we're going to take back our government and in your name and in the name of people across the country, restore the democracy that Pakistan is proud of.

MR. SCHNEIDER: Could I just add one thing?

REP. VAN HOLLEN: Sure.

MR. SCHNEIDER: Quetta, you know, is in Balochistan. And one of the changes would be with a democratic government is that the -- both PPP and the PML --

REP. VAN HOLLEN: N.

MR. SCHNEIDER: N -- have stated that they would end the direct confrontation with the Baloch National parties in Balogistan. That would then provide a unified government, aiming at restricting the Taliban and al Qaeda in that province, which you don't have now.

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