Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf has confounded his enemies foreign and domestic by neither rigging nor canceling the general election.(The Week)(Brief article)

Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf has confounded his enemies foreign and domestic by neither rigging nor canceling the general election. It would have been easy for him to fix the polls, and in keeping not just with his overblown reputation as a sinister Latin American--style dictator, but also with Pakistani democratic norms. Prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a great progressive hero, famously rigged the 1977 election (even though he would have won it anyway). Instead, Musharraf has played relatively fair. His security forces, moreover, were able to ensure that the elections were not disrupted by terrorist bombs or a more than usually high level of violence. For a president accused of both authoritarianism and incompetence it was an impressive achievement. It will be interesting to see if the leaders of the country's victorious opposition parties can turn ...