Governing is hard & protesting is easy.
Pakistan Opposition Faces a Test of Its New Power - WSJ.com
PESHAWAR, Pakistan—Fazl Elahi rued the day he believed Imran Khan’s promise of a new Pakistan as he watched the former cricket star’s backers halt highway traffic to protest American drone strikes.
In elections seven months ago, Mr. Elahi’s vote helped put Mr. Khan’s maverick party in power here in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province on the Afghan frontier.
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Cricketer-turned politician Imran Khan, center, at a protest in Islamabad against U.S. drone strikes. Critics accuse him of neglecting other issues. Associated Press
“They are not sincere, and I will not vote for them again,” the 35-year-old restaurant owner said over the weekend. “God knows what benefit they have in going on about the drone attacks. They should deal with our real issues.”
Sentiment appears to be turning against Mr. Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the only one of Pakistan’s four provinces where an anti-American movement holds power. Instead of focusing on a broken economy and endemic violence, critics say, PTI has been obsessed with its campaign against American drones.
How PTI governs Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, home to 22 million people, is an important test for a movement that became a major force after the May elections.
Success here, party officials say, would pave the way for PTI to vault to national power in the next elections, transforming Pakistan’s political landscape and strategic direction. It has been hard going, with allies breaking away and discontent building within the ranks.
“To govern this province is not an easy thing,” PTI’s leader in Peshawar, the provincial Education Minister Muhammad Atif, acknowledged. “The problems that we have are more than what we thought.”
During the last elections in May, PTI wooed voters with promises to root out corruption and empower the middle class. The party and the PTI government of Pakistan’s only predominantly Pashtun province have made some headway against graft. Most of their energy since the election, however, has focused on stopping the drone strikes against Taliban militants.
Last month, PTI closed the main highway connecting Pakistan with Afghanistan to coalition supply trucks in a bid to force the U.S. to stop the drone attacks. But it angered many Peshawar businessmen who depend on cross-border trade.
“What the people want and what the PTI government is doing, it’s poles apart,” says Aftab Ahmad Sherpao, a former provincial chief minister and, until recently, a PTI ally. “All that Imran Khan wants is to create space for himself on the national level, so that he can become prime minister of Pakistan in the next election.”
He is using the suffering of the people of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa for his own purposes."
The party headed by Mr. Sherpao has nine of 124 provincial legislature seats, and was part of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa government until last month, when PTI accused two of its ministers of corruption. Mr. Sherpao says these accusations were motivated by disagreement over the blockade, which he said mostly hurts the Pashtuns who dominate the trucking trade.
In fact, it is unclear to what extent the drone campaign is actually unpopular here, in a province that has been hardest hit by far-deadlier Taliban bombings and killings.
“Openly, nobody has the courage to support the drones,” says Iftikhar Hussain, a secular politician who served as information minister in the previous provincial government, and whose son was assassinated by the Taliban in 2010. “But if you ask people in a secret ballot, especially in Waziristan, they will all support them. The drones are the only weapon that targets the terrorists.”
While the national government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif also opposes the U.S. drone strikes as a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty, it has done little to stop them.U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel discussed the drone issue and PTI’s protests in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa with Mr. Sharif Monday. Mr. Hagel warned that continued obstruction of the road could imperil hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. payments to the Pakistani military.
The Taliban have failed to reciprocate PTI’s gestures and showed little appreciation for its antidrone campaign. A suicide bomber assassinated one of PTI’s provincial ministers in October. In late September, the Taliban carried out several car bombings in Peshawar, devastating the city’s historic Qissa Khwani, or storytellers’, bazaar.
Sitting in his printing shop at the Qissa Khwani bazaar, Zafar Khattak, head of the printers association uniting some 1,000 artisanal print shops, started to cry when reminded about PTI’s promise to end Taliban violence within 90 days of taking office, as he recalled several car bombings in Peshawar in September.
Though Mr. Khattak was unhurt in those attacks, a previous Taliban bombing, last year, severely damaged the retina of his left eye.
“Peshawar is like an orphan. No one is looking after us,” he said. The PTI government, he added, “is neglecting the people who’ve put them in power.”.
