Pakistan fixed Afghan presidential polls: Mushahid

Says Obama’s policies towards Pakistan, Afghanistan have failed

WASHINGTON: Pakistan fixed Afghanistan's presidential elections in favour of Hamid Karzai in 2009, revealed Senator Mushahid Hussain in an exclusive talk with The News.

Recalling the roller coaster that was behind the election campaign, the senator pointed towards Pakistan's role in shaping the polling results by explicitly saying that "the election, we know how to rig, and they were duly rigged in favour of Karzai."

Senator Mushahid claimed that he had told American officials that Karzai was smarter than any of them and had the capacity to outsmart and still survive.

"President Hamid Karzai knew that Americans were gunning for him. He switched from America to Pakistan, earned a good will, and there were three million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and we were supposed to be holding their elections, and all the threemillion voted for Karzai," the senator added.

Mushahid Hussain was touring the US a couple of weeks ago to apprise the administration about Indian atrocities and human right violations in held Kashmir as Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's special envoy. 

Mushahid Hussain also chairs the Senate Defence Committee and Parliamentary Committee on China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

Speaking, on the record, about the geo-political situation and American influence in the region, the senator also asserted that President Obama's Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke met with him in Lahore in 2009 before the presidential elections in Afghanistan in August. "Holbrooke took out a notepad and he said to me, 'Tell me who should be the next president of Afghanistan," Mushahid said he found the remark very arrogant and pompous. "I said, Holbrooke, are you deciding the presidency today? Is it just pick and choose? It's not going to happen," he said.

This is the first time that a sitting senator from Pakistan admitted to influencing elections in Afghanistan. Senator Mushahid Hussain was chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, as well as one of the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League (Q).

Senator Mushahid Hussain, talking to The News, also criticised the US role in Afghanistan, saying that the Americans could not decide a precise policy towards the region. "It’s quite evident that Obama's policies towards Pakistan and Afghanistan have failed. They could not figure out the region. Sometimes they want Pakistan to take on the Taliban, other time they want Pakistan to talk to the Taliban. Sometime they talk about surge, then they talk about withdrawal from Afghanistan," he said, adding that there has been a lot of failure and confusion in Obama administration.

It is pertinent to mention that millions of Afghans went to the polls on August 20, 2009 for the country's second presidential election since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. President Karzai faced a fiercely contested re-election campaign. He claimed that he bagged over fifty per cent of the votes, but the allegations of fraudulent voting persisted. After two months of political turmoil, Afghanistan's election commission ordered a runoff election in November but just days before that Karzai's top rival, Abdullah Abdullah, withdrew. During that time Karzai remained critical of US strategy and by the end of his tenure declined to sign a Bilateral Security Agreement to authorise a continued US presence in Afghanistan.

The News contacted the US State Department for a reaction but the officials declined to comment. Former Afghan president Hamid Karzai and current Afghan government officials including Abdullah Abdullah were also approached in this time but they did not respond.

However, in an interview to RT - a Russian media outlet, Hamid Karzai called Pakistan a "major, major factor" for peace in Afghanistan but insisted that it has not played its hand well in Afghanistan. "Afghanistan could have been a great friend of Pakistan, and we wanted that friendship to be there. They were seeking other forms of relations with Afghanistan - one of domination, one of exploitation, one of them determining events in Afghanistan," Karzai alleged.