an excellent snap shot of the ballot box regards islamic fund. efforts to turn their platforms into reality by virtue of the electoral process...and their failure to perform well.


Islam at the Ballot Box
By AMIR TAHERI
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ASIA
February 22, 2008

Pakistan's election has been portrayed by the Western media as a defeat for President Pervez Musharraf. The real losers were the Islamist parties.

The latest analysis of the results shows that the parties linked, or at least sympathetic, to the Taliban and al Qaeda saw their share of the votes slashed to about 3% from almost 11% in the last general election a few years ago. The largest coalition of the Islamist parties, the United Assembly for Action (MMA), lost control of the Northwest Frontier Province -- the only one of Pakistan's four provinces it governed. The winner in the province is the avowedly secularist National Awami Party.

Despite vast sums of money spent by the Islamic Republic in Tehran and wealthy Arabs from the Persian Gulf states, the MMA failed to achieve the "approaching victory" (fatah al-qarib) that Islamist candidates, both Shiite and Sunni, had boasted was coming.

The Islamist defeat in Pakistan confirms a trend that's been under way for years. Conventional wisdom had it that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the lack of progress in the Israel-Palestine conflict, would provide radical Islamists with a springboard from which to seize power through elections.

Analysts in the West used that prospect to argue against the Bush Doctrine of spreading democracy in the Middle East. These analysts argued that Muslims were not ready for democracy, and that elections would only translate into victory for hard-line Islamists.

The facts tell a different story. So far, no Islamist party has managed to win a majority of the popular vote in any of the Muslim countries where reasonably clean elections are held. If anything, the Islamist share of the vote has been declining across the board.

Take Jordan. In last November's general election, the Islamic Action Front suffered a rout, as its share of the votes fell to 5% from almost 15% in elections four years ago. The radical fundamentalist group, linked with the Islamic Brotherhood movement, managed to keep only six of its 17 seats in the National Assembly. Its independent allies won no seats.

In Malaysia, the Islamists have never gone beyond 11% of the popular vote. In Indonesia, the various Islamist groups have never collected more than 17%. The Islamists' share of the popular vote in Bangladesh declined from an all-time high of 11% in the 1980s to around 7% in the late 1990s.

In Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas -- the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood -- won the 2006 general election with 44% of the votes, far short of the "crushing wave of support" it had promised. Even then, it was clear that at least some of those who run on a Hamas ticket did not share its radical Islamist ideology. Despite years of misrule and corruption, Fatah, Hamas's secularist rival, won 42% of the popular vote.

In Turkey, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has won two successive general elections, the latest in July 2007, with 44% of the popular vote. Even then, AKP leaders go out of their way to insist that the party "has nothing to do with religion."

"We are a modern, conservative, European-style party," AKP leader and Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, likes to repeat at every opportunity. In last July's general election, the AKP lost 23 seats and, with it, its two-third majority in the Grand National Assembly.

AKP's success in Turkey inspired Moroccan Islamists to create a similar outfit called Party of Justice and Development (PDJ). The PDJ sought support from AKP "experts" to prepare for last September's general election in Morocco. Yet when the votes were counted, the PDJ collected just over 10% of the popular vote, winning 46 of the 325 seats.

Islamists have done no better in neighboring Algeria. In the latest general election, held in May 2007, the two Islamist parties, Movement for a Peaceful Society and Algerian Awakening, won less than 12% of the popular vote.

Kuwait is another Arab country where the holding of reasonably fair elections has become part of the national culture. In the general election in 2006, a well-funded and sophisticated Islamist bloc collected 27% of the votes and won 17 of the 50 seats in the National Assembly.

In Lebanon's last general election in 2005, the two Islamist parties, Hezbollah (Party of God) and Amal (Hope) collected 21% of the popular vote to win 28 of the 128 seats in the parliament. This despite massive financial and propaganda support from the Islamic Republic in Iran, and electoral pacts with a Christian political bloc led by the pro-Tehran former Gen. Michel Aoun.

Many observers do not regard Egypt's elections as free and fair enough to use as a basis for political analysis. Nevertheless, the latest general election, held in 2005, can be regarded as the most serious since the 1940s, if only because the Islamist opposition was allowed to field candidates and campaign publicly. In the event, however, Muslim Brotherhood candidates collected less than 20% of the popular vote.

Other Arab countries where elections are not yet up to acceptable standards include Oman and Bahrain. But even in those countries, the Islamists have not done better than anywhere else in the region. In Tunisia and Libya, the Islamists are banned and thus have not put their political strength to the electoral test.

Afghanistan and Iraq have held a series of elections since the fall of the Taliban in Kabul and the Baath in Baghdad. By all standards, these have been generally free and fair elections, and thus valid tests of the public mood. In Afghanistan, Islamist groups, including former members of the Taliban, have managed to win around 11% of the popular vote on the average.

The picture in Iraq is more complicated, because voters have been faced with bloc lists that hide the identity of political parties behind a blanket ethnic and/or sectarian identity. Only the next general election in 2009 could reveal the true strength of the political parties, since it will not be contested based on bloc lists. Frequent opinion polls, however, show that support for avowedly Islamist parties, both Shiite and Sunni, would not exceed 25% of the popular vote.

Far from rejecting democracy because it is supposed to be "alien," or using it as a means of creating totalitarian Islamist systems, a majority of Muslims have repeatedly shown that they like elections, and would love to join the global mainstream of democratization. President Bush is right to emphasize the importance of holding free and fair elections in all Muslim majority countries.

Tyrants fear free and fair elections, a fact illustrated by the Khomeinist regime's efforts to fix the outcome of next month's poll in Iran by pre-selecting the candidates. Support for democratic movements in the Muslim world remains the only credible strategy for winning the war against terror.

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__________________
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile....

well it appears that it's pretty much a done deal, paki's MMA was smacked down.......their followers it appears are pissed they didn't deliver sharia law and that public works they promised didn't materialze.....


Religion's Defeat in Pakistan's Election
Friday, Feb. 29, 2008 By SIMON ROBINSON/PESHAWAR
Asif Hassan / AFP / Getty



Two weeks after humiliating losses in Pakistan's parliamentary elections, the religious parties that swept parts of the country in the 2002 poll are still coming to terms with what went wrong this time around. In a small, cold office in central Peshawar, ousted provincial assembly member Mohamed Zakir Shah goes through all his achievements over the past five years, including securing land for a hospital, building new roads and buying land for new schools in his constituency. His enthusiasm fades as he gets to the end of the list and Shah, 37, a member of the Markazi Jamiat Ahl-e-Hadith, a small party in the religious coalition that did so well in 2002, slumps back in his chair and shakes his head. "The people have not cooperated with me," he says. "The job is difficult but it is also interesting. It is a good job if you want to help people but they do not always help you back."


That's for sure. Nationally, Pakistan's religious coalition known as Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) slumped from 56 elected seats out of 272 to just six in the new assembly. They also lost big in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), which they have run for the past five years. The reasons for their defeat lie both in the way they won in 2002 and in their failures since then. Victory in 2002 relied in large part on a huge groundswell of anti-American sentiment after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan. Many observers also suspect that the army and the government of President Pervez Musharraf, which helped put the grouping of disparate religious parties together, may have helped them at the ballot box. Since then, according to many citizens in the NWFP, the MMA has failed to deliver better services and, perhaps even worse, supported Musharraf in his hugely unpopular on-again, off-again campaign against militants along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan.

To add to those problems, the MMA split last year and some of its constituent member parties boycotted the latest polls. But even without that split, "they would not have won because of their performance as a government," says Rafique Ahmed Ghuncha, an Islamabad-based politician who has followed NWFP politics for decades and who ran as an independent two weeks ago and lost. "All the promises of public works were broken and the conservatives [in the electorate] were unhappy that [the MMA] didn't introduce shari'a law. They had failed."

Former provincial member Shah agrees that the MMA did not deliver on all its promises but says that the government in Peshawar was hurt by the fact that most of its budget comes from Islamabad. Shah's theory — shared by others in the MMA — was that Islamabad never wanted the religious parties to succeed for fear they would win more support in other parts of the country. "The people wanted to see big change but the federal government made sure it was small change," he says.

That's probably too conspiratorial, even for Pakistan. The man who won Shah's seat, Alam Zeb, 46, a member of the secularist and nationalist Awami National Party (ANP), says the MMA have nobody to blame but themselves. "There was a lot of difference between words and action in the MMA government," he says, before pointing to the outgoing government's support of Musharraf's anti-militant campaign as the single most damaging policy. "There is no doubt they were a B team of Musharraf's and people didn't like this."

The ANP will now form a new government in the North West and may also join the Pakistan People's Party of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz of ex-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in a large anti-Musharraf coalition in federal parliament. All three parties have said they will try to open up talks with the militants, whose violent attacks against state, military and civilian targets have killed hundreds of people over the past year. (Two suicide bombings in the past three days have killed at least 70 more). A spokesman for one of the myriad militant organizations said last week that his group would be open to dialogue. "We will solve all the problems through a jirga," says the ANP's Zeb, using the local name for tribal meeting. "We are Pashtuns and these people are Pashtuns and we will sit down and work out a solution."

Of course the religious parties are largely Pahstun as well and their own attempts at dialogue didn't get far over the past five years. And not all the militants are Pashtuns; some are Arab and central Asian fighters associated with al-Qaeda who are unlikely to be wooed by promises of meetings and talks. That's not to say that talking with some groups might not work where force has failed. But it's also plausible that the electoral defeat of the democratic wing of Pakistani fundamentalism might actually strengthen the hand of some Jihadists who believe that their cause can never win from inside the system. "This will certainly give an edge to those people who are not interested in the democratic process," agrees Ghuncha. "Extremist forces can now put forward this argument."

more at-

Religion's Defeat in Pakistan's Election - TIME

__________________
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile....