On Friday, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif resigned after the Pakistani Supreme Court disqualified him from office on charges of corruption. Sharif’s family finances were uncovered as part of the 2015 Panama Papers and led many opposition parties to call for an investigation into offshore accounts belonging to Sharif and his children. Sharif’s ousting comes approximately one year before Pakistan’s next scheduled election and calls into question Pakistan’s political direction. The Cipher Brief’s Bennett Seftel sat down with Dan Markey, Pakistan expert at Johns Hopkins University, to discuss these recent events and how they could impact U.S.-Pakistan relations moving forward.
The Cipher Brief: What do you make of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s resignation?
Dan Markey: The resignation itself is a consequence of a fairly long and drawn out judicial process that ultimately, like many of these things, found Nawaz Sharif guilty more on the basis of a technicality than on the broader question of core corruption and abuse of power. And yet, the entire process has drawn into question his business dealings, the business dealings of his family, and particularly his daughter who was being groomed as a potential political successor.
So, his ouster really sets up a question for his political party, the Pakistan Muslim League (N), which he has now owned as a political dynasty for decades. It raises a lot of political questions about what will happen in the immediate aftermath and how that will have a consequence for looming national elections that are supposed to take place next year.
TCB: Who are some of Sharif’s potential successors?
Markey: In most ways, Shehbaz Sharif, Nawaz Sharif’s brother, is the leading candidate. He and his brother have long had a close working partnership, with Shehbaz currently serving as the chief minister of Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province. As a consequence of decades of working together, they have attained a division of labor where Nawaz Sharif has been the political boss and the national level politician and his brother has essentially been the chief operating officer and the guy who knows how to get things done. He has established a reputation for being able to work effectively with the bureaucracy but was never quite able to be seen as an independent political operator in his own right.
Now, he is the natural successor, particularly since Nawaz Sharif’s daughter has been disqualified, and Shehbaz, for the moment, is clean.
The consequence of that and the fact that there aren’t a lot of other potential names in the ranks is quite interesting because whereas Nawaz Sharif has been seen as problematic by the Pakistani army, Shehbaz Sharif has been more of a darling of the Pakistani military.
Perhaps the most interesting thing of this entire drama is that it is hard to read it as much other than the creeping pressure of military and establishment figures to put this political party into a box and to make it more manageable and controllable. If Shehbaz Sharif becomes the next Prime Minister, they’ll have accomplished, at least for the time being, precisely what many of them have been saying they’ve wanted to do for the last four years or so.
So, there is a lot more at stake here and a lot more interest than simply an anti-corruption probe that knocked out a political figure.
TCB: Nawaz Sharif was the 18th Prime Minister of Pakistan and none of his 17 predecessors completed their terms in office. Do you think this is a pattern?
Markey: First of all, Pakistan’s previous election in 2013 was the first election where power was transferred from one civilian government to another. We’re talking about a country in which political transitions have almost always been from civilian to military or have been pressured by crisis. So it’s partly that. And it’s partly that the military or other civilians have frequently tried to put each other into jail or in exile rather than trying to win at the ballot box.
It’s interesting to see this because we also have to remember that former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, effectively a military dictator, was also pushed out in many ways due to a scuffle with the Pakistani Supreme Court. This raises questions about the role of the judiciary in Pakistan.
At the very least, we have to say that over the past decade it has become a useful tool for pushing political transition and placing pressure on political leaders, but has not yet developed a means by which to achieve better governance or to go after corruption in a systematic way.
TCB: Does the Pakistani Supreme Court work closely with the Pakistani Army against political figures?
Markey: It’s difficult to ascribe to the Supreme Court and to the justices any one allegiance because the last time around the court was putting pressure on a military leader – Musharraf, and this time it’s a civilian leader – Sharif. You have to see it as a vehicle for pushing political transition in a county where the ballot box can be more difficult. This is becoming an effective means more than an independent force.
I hope that the Pakistani Supreme Court becomes an independent force, but it’s hard to see it that way because so many of Pakistan’s other leaders have been widely perceived as corrupt or otherwise violating the rule of law and their violations have not been well enforced. The court seems to be too selective to be seen as a strong and independent judiciary in and of itself.
TCB: What could happen to Nawaz Sharif?
Markey: It’s almost impossible to anticipate precisely what will happen to Sharif. It’s conceivable that he would try to the leave the country to avoid any further prosecution. Or you could see a drawn-out court fight. It’s hard to speculate.
TCB: Nawaz Sharif has been a prominent figure in Pakistani politics for decades. Are there other individuals who can now shoulder the mantle of Pakistani politics?
Markey: This is a moment in which Nawaz Sharif’s party has pretty well established itself as the dominant national political party even though its core power base is in Punjab and it has much less strength in the other smaller provinces around the country. Why that’s interesting is because you don’t have obvious other national parties as you did in the 1990s. There used to be the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), but that’s been so weakened over the past decade that it and its leader, Asif Ali Zardari, don’t really represent a national, clear alternative to the PML(N).
The one other major party in the country right now is the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) run by Imran Khan, the former cricket star. While they have the potential to challenge the PML(N), probably the best way that they could really come to power would require a true fracturing of the PML(N) as a party. That’s now possible with Nawaz Sharif getting knocked out.
There are a lot of political pieces being thrown in the air right now. How they fall back down could benefit the PTI. At the very least, the PML(N) will be weakened by this, and by most perspectives the military stands to gain from a weaker civilian leadership.
TCB: How should the U.S. view Nawaz Sharif’s resignation? Could this potentially open the door for an improvement in U.S.-Pakistan relations under a new Pakistani prime minister?
Markey: A change in leadership has always been viewed by both sides as an opportunity for a bit of a fresh start, so it’s conceivable that both sides will see value in playing it that way.
A Shehbaz Sharif government might be somewhat more savvy or effective in terms of its dealings with the U.S. Nawaz Sharif has been remarkably flatfooted in terms of tone and substance when reaching out to the U.S. Part of that reflects his view that the U.S. is not the principal means by which he got into power, that he doesn’t owe the U.S. very much, and he doesn’t see a lot of value in that relationship relative to his predecessors in the PPP.
Sharif’s resignation opens a bit of a window for a better rapport between Islamabad and Washington, but there are much bigger forces and interests at work, which could make that a pretty short-lived honeymoon.
TCB: What are the broader consequences that this event will have for civilian democracy in Pakistan?
Markey: There is a possibility of reading a somewhat rosier story, which is that the court’s ruling could be interpreted as a sign that Pakistan’s politicians have to get cleaner and can’t so obviously flout the rule of law and be corrupt. If that’s how it’s widely interpreted in Pakistan, that’s a healthy development.
But as I previously mentioned, there are a lot of important political reasons for seeing it as a ruling that’s based on more than that or, in some ways, less than that. That’s what’s worrisome. It’s not so simple as draining the swamp of a corrupt politician. There are a lot of politics and a history behind it, and it needs to be appreciated in those terms.
