U.S. Endorses Pakistan’s Sham Election

The U.S. State Department this week congratulated Pakistan’s new prime minister on assuming power, following elections that were marred by widespread allegations of rigging, voter suppression, and violence targeting supporters of imprisoned former prime minister Imran Khan. On a special crossover episode of Intercepted and Deconstructed, hosts Murtaza Hussain and Ryan Grim discuss the aftermath of Pakistan’s February 8 election, as well as growing calls inside the U.S. to hold Pakistan’s military-backed regime accountable for its ongoing suppression of democracy. Hussain and Grim also discuss U.S. interests in the region, and the historical ties between the Pakistani military and its supporters in Washington.

[Intercepted theme music.]

Murtaza Hussain: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Murtaza Hussain.

This week, the United States announced its recognition of a new government in Pakistan, led by a coalition of parties opposed to former Prime Minister Imran Khan. The recognition comes on the heels of a brazenly fraudulent election this February that saw massive voter suppression, rigging, and outright violence targeted at Khan supporters.

Despite that crackdown, and despite Khan’s ongoing imprisonment on politically motivated corruption charges, his party still garnered more votes than any other party. The result of this election has further bled away legitimacy from the military-run Pakistani regime and its civilian clients who are now relying on Washington to give them the legitimacy that they seem to lack domestically.

Joining to discuss today is my colleague Ryan Grim, host of Deconstructed, who’s also reported on Pakistan with me over the past year. Ryan, welcome to the show. 

Ryan Grim: Thanks for having me here.

MH: So, Ryan, you’ve been a staple at State Department briefings in D.C. talking about Pakistan, both before the election and since then. Can you give us a little glimpse of what the U.S. official response has been to this election, which has struck many people around the world and Pakistan beyond as maybe one of the most rigged and the most unfair and unfree elections Pakistan’s had, certainly in recent history?

RG: Not just Pakistan, it’s probably — at least over the last, say, 30 years or so — the most obviously rigged election in a country where you expect some basic level of democracy.

Now, obviously, Pakistan has had a flawed and challenging time. The democracy movement there has serious adversaries internally in Pakistan. What I mean by the fact that you might expect it to be democratic is, say, to compare it to something like Saddam Hussein or Bashar al-Assad. Like, when Saddam Hussein wins, like, 98 percent or 100 percent to zero, nobody says, “I’m so shocked. Because, you know, Saddam Hussein has such strong democratic bona fides that I can’t believe he would undermine democracy like that.”

But in a country where you have contested elections, and you have an election commission that is supposed to be taken seriously, there probably hasn’t been — that I can think of, I’m curious for your take — an election that was so flagrantly and almost comically rigged. I don’t want to say that it’s funny, because this is a country of more than 200 million people, [and] we’re watching their democracy get flushed down the drain, but the way they’re doing it is just, wow.

I’ll give you one example that I just saw circulating today. On one of the forms that the election commission just uploaded, on the original form, the PTI candidate, or the independent candidate — he’s independent because he wasn’t allowed to run as PTI — got 584 votes in this one precinct. When they uploaded the form, you can see that somebody took a pen and drew a circle around the five, and turned the five into a zero, kind of with a little slash through it, which then leaves you with the number “084.” But then, when you look at it, you’re like, that looks like a kid just turned a five into a zero. And they did that kind of all across the country.

Can you think of a comparison in another country that is expected to have reasonably transparent elections that flipped it this flagrantly?

MH: No. It’s a really, really good point you’re making. It’s because Pakistan has had very, very serious challenges with military rule, and dictatorship, and threats to democracy for pretty much its entire history. But it’s always had nascent democratic institutions, it’s never been a one-man state run by Bashar Assad or Saddam Hussein, something like that.

So, people have expectation that they can say a lot of things that they want to say. And then, if they vote, maybe there will be some manipulation, but it’ll still be an election which is somehow worth voting in, you could say. Not like a 95 percent or 99 percent for one guy type of situation. But I think it’s because Pakistan is a very— First of all, it inherited democratic institutions at the outset, it had the setup ready for democracy, and people tend to take that seriously.

But also, it’s a very big country. It’s 250 million people by some estimates, definitely well over 200 million. It’s very hard to control that number of people in a way you would a smaller dictatorship of 20 million people, the way they say Syria was at some point.

So, it’s a very unruly society in a way, in a good way, in the sense that it had a very boisterous press, a very boisterous civil society. And I think this is the first time that I certainly have ever seen — and I’m talking to people there pretty regularly who I’ve known for years — seen the level of suppression and fear, and that type of fear, that type of military-controlled fear of a whole society that’s never existed before.

And this election was really fascinating, because I think that they did so much before the vote to suppress the PTI, including, as you alluded to, banning the party from actually contesting, and forcing the candidates to contest as independents, putting Imran Khan in jail, trying to humiliate him in various different ways and ruin his reputation. Despite all that rigging and all that preelection sort of manipulation, which was far in excess of what we’ve [ever] seen in Pakistan ever, the PTI still did really well.

PTI affiliate candidates actually trounced the opposition, and I think this is significant of something which has been kind of building up in Pakistan for a long time. It’s that, if you follow the politics of the country, the military is always the hand behind the throne, you could say, but in the front, on the throne, there seems to be this rotating set of families, like the Bhutto family or the Sharif family. And it’s almost become monarchical in a way, that these few groups of families think that the country belongs to them, and they extract huge financial benefits from the situation and, meanwhile, the military keeps its own prerogatives, the military controls so much of the economy. And this situation, which has become so intolerable, is reaching the point where it could only really be enforced by a dictatorship now.

And so, you’re seeing Pakistan, which — as you said very well — it’s had some reasonable democratic institutions despite all the suppression, [but] it’s moving towards more of a situation where you’re going to have to govern it like Saddam Hussein or Bashar Assad did their countries. And I think that it would be very, very dangerous and very, very violent, because how can you control that many people using that much violence without kind of cracking society up? So I think that that’s coming.

And, to your point, I can’t think of a single country that has had elections which were rigged in such a strange and bizarre way, with the expectation that it should have been real elections. Because I saw the videos and some of the footage that you mentioned. I also saw videos of people running up to polling stations and dumping all the votes in the back of a truck — almost comical, cartoonish levels of manipulation.

And it also struck me that the Pakistani military has been caught kind of flatfooted by the digital age, which is really unacceptable in 2024, because I think that this type of rigging, if everyone has a cell phone camera in Pakistan now, or most people do, or more than people do [than ever], you’re getting caught if you do that, and you’ll get caught by that type of brazen sort of behavior. And, also, our reporting has kind of caught them flatfooted, too because, as much as they’ve tried to stop Pakistan’s traditional media, they cannot silence the entire planet and the entire planet’s media, which is the situation they’re facing at the moment. So, that’s really interesting.

And I wanted to ask you, as you kind of mentioned it a little bit, too, but you’re at the State Department on a regular basis, and Pakistan comes up quite a bit, and you’re bringing it up, and other people are bringing it up. What is the role of the U.S. in the situation, and why is the U.S. opinion of what’s going on in Pakistan so important to the situation itself, but also to elites in Pakistan, evidently?

RG: I feel like some of it is almost psychological, that there’s some kind of postcolonial relationship that the Pakistani elite — the Pakistani military in particular — has with the United States, where there’s a real hunger for approval. Because the amount of money flowing from the U.S. to Pakistan is not comparable, say, to Israel, or Saudi Arabia, or some of our other nations where you might expect to get that kind of reaction. So, some of it just feels almost like a part of the postcolonial culture.

On the other hand, Pakistan is, to a significant degree, an aid state that is running an extraction-based economy, which means that it constantly needs fresh infusions of global capital. China is a major investor as well. The IMF plays a huge role in their politics. The IMF played a big role in the last government, the ouster of Imran Khan and the upcoming reassessment of the next tranche of the IMF loan is going to play a huge role in Pakistani politics. And hanging over that is the specter of the United States, because we can pull a lot of strings over at the IMF.

Leading up to the election, the response that you would get from the State Department was effectively a green light for rampant electoral fraud and rigging. And it doesn’t sound like it, you have to be able to parse the language that you’re hearing, but that’s what diplomats are very good at.

So, what you would often hear from the State Department whenever I or other reporters there would confront them with the most recent allegation of massive rigging. Things like not letting candidates file for office, or a candidate comes to file to run for office and they abduct him at the office. Or he files for office, goes home, and his home is raided, and he’s thrown in prison. We’re not talking like tiki tac electoral violations here, we’re talking about major suppression or, like, literally banning the party from running, things like that.

You would hear from the podium: we encourage Pakistan, like all countries, to hold free and fair elections, and we look forward to those elections being free and fair. You know, just very generic statements. And you might say, OK, well, that’s wonderful. You know, the United States standing up for free and fair elections. Good for them.

Anytime a country that was in a more adversarial posture, vis a vis the United States, had any type of irregularities going on, you could see what the United States is capable of, and that’s anywhere from sanctions to much harsher language. Belarus had an election recently. Practically before the polls were closed, State Department was out with a statement that says, we condemn the sham elections in Belarus.

Iran, when it cut the internet during some protests, the State Department put out a livid statement talking about the way that it was suppressing, it was suppressing people’s freedom of assembly and ability to communicate with each other. When Pakistan shut down the internet during its own election, you get a very muted statement.

Then, in response to the obvious shenanigans that were going on in Pakistan, you’d start to get words from the State Department like, they’re concerned about the irregularities. But you compare that to what you were hearing from a lot of Democrats on Capitol Hill, they were saying there should be no recognition of a future government that comes out of this sham process without an independent election investigation.

The State Department never went that far, and my understanding is that that was read by the Pakistani government as essentially a green light. That, OK, the United States is expressing some embarrassment, basically, about how ridiculously the Pakistani establishment has rigged this election, but they’re not going to stand in our way from forming an anti-Imran Khan coalition, even though it was quite clear on election day that Imran Khan’s coalition, his party, won an overwhelming majority of the votes.

MH: You know, it’s fascinating that there has been such a brazen — as you kind of described it — steal, and the U.S. has kind of been a handmaiden to that. Very quiet before the election, and certainly quiet and accepting of the outcome since then.

It’s very interesting, the statement — I think you pointed out on Twitter or X — the statement that the U.S. put out about Shehbaz Sharif, the new Prime Minister, accepting powers, that we congratulated him on assuming power. They didn’t actually say, per se, that it congratulated him on winning the election.

RG: Yeah, I have it here. You want to hear it?

MH: Yeah.

RG: So, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad posts— And all of everything in diplomacy matters. Like, does it come from Blinken? Does it come from Biden? Does it come from somebody lower in the State Department? Does it come from the Ambassador’s personal Twitter account? Does it come from a different account? Everything is parsed.

And so, this one comes from the Twitter account of the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, so it’s kind of the lowest level of a Twitter account that you could choose to send out a message. They say “DB,” which is the U.S. Ambassador of Pakistan, that’s all, he signs it at the end, DB. He says, “I extended my congratulations to Shehbaz Sharif today on his assumption of office as Prime Minister of Pakistan. I look forward to working closely with the government and people of Pakistan on our mutual interests.”

To me, you can read two things from that. One is that they really felt the pressure from the Pakistani diaspora here in the United States, and from the global outcry, not to full-throatedly [sic] endorse this brazen theft. But, also, that there was really nothing that the diaspora or any other entity could do that was going to stand in the way of the U.S. moving forward and recognizing this coalition, which is the one that it wanted to take power, but they did it in the weakest way possible: I congratulate him on his assumption of office.

And Matt Miller over at the State Department described it as “a selection,” which is kind of funny, because you often hear radicals in the street chanting, “Selection, not election! Selection, not election!” And then you’ve got the State Department spokesperson referring to the election as a selection, yet still recognizing it. So, it has the power.

Now, what power it has in this fractured country remains to be seen. It might be a little bit of a poison chalice that they’ve taken to their lips here.

MH: It’s so funny, because I’m sure that most Americans are not even aware that this happened, or that the U.S. government has played this role in Pakistan. But I’m talking to people in Pakistan these days, and they’re very upset. They’re very upset of, obviously, the double standards and hypocrisy. And also, despite all the missteps of the U.S., people still sort of look to it as the only kind of power outside which can validate or give their approval to a democratic outcome, and it’s so clear that there was not any democratic outcome or democratic process in Pakistan at all.

And yet, for the U.S. to weigh in, and to give this sort of thumbs up to it — however weak and however sort of caveated it was — it was very alienating to people. It’s kind of a consistent theme of foreign policy, in my view, that, Pakistanis are noticing very much that the U.S. took this position, but Americans are not aware of it, because they have other things going on and they’re not focused on X/Y/Z issue in South Asia.

But those negative sentiments in Pakistan are going to exist now towards the U.S., because of the actions of some State Department officials who deemed it in their interest to recognize an election that they knew was not real.

I was kind of curious, from your perspective: Obviously, Pakistan was very important to the U.S. during the Cold War, during the war on terror, and the U.S. war in Afghanistan, it played a role that the U.S. needed to rely upon. But now, today, I don’t really see a lot of strategic utility of Pakistan to the U.S. And the military in Pakistan has always looked to find ways to make itself relevant to the U.S., and it’s really struggling. It has a story we did a few months ago about the arms sales to Ukraine, but it’s kind of more peripheral activity.

I’m kind of curious, from your perspective, in your view, why do you think the State Department may have felt the need to weigh in and give this sort of reward to something that I think they knew was not a real election? Was there a strategic benefit, or was it more like an inertia, that they just don’t care about Pakistan enough, so they’ll recognize whoever’s in power there? Or is there more like a settling scores with Imran Khan situation that may be an undercurrent of it?

RG: I mean, I think you can never underestimate the power of score-settling and inertia combined. I think that might end up having a significant amount of explanatory power. But, beyond that, it is a really interesting question, because the U.S. is going to take heat. It’s expending its most valuable capital, which is its ability to talk about freedom and democracy, by championing this election. Like, it’s really embarrassing for the U.S. to allow this to happen, because now, anytime they talk about the sham election in Belarus, or the sham election in Iran, or the sham election in Bolivia, or Venezuela, or wherever they want to go next, and complain about democracy not being respected by X/Y/Z adversary, they can easily point back and say, look at this clown show that you supported and operated in Pakistan. Like, don’t tell us that you care about democracy.

So, they’re willing to take a really powerful hit to stand behind this absurdity, which then raises your very good question of why. Like, there must be some compelling U.S. interest that they see on the other side of this debacle that makes it worth taking this hit. And what is that?

We have, like you said, the inertia and the score-settling against Khan. But, to me, it indicates that there is more going on when it comes to U.S. jockeying vis a vis India and China than we even understand. That’s my guess, is that there must be some play that the U.S. sees here in Pakistan that relates both to its interest in kind of buttressing India, and raising India up as a bulwark against China, and also some concern that China and Pakistan — which have deep historical ties and financial ties together — that if they get too close together, that somehow that undermines whatever strategic interests the U.S. has in that region.

It’s hard for me to get my head around exactly what it is that they think they’re doing. They may not know entirely what it is. But that’s my guess, that it has something to do with their interest in basically cozying up to this rising power of India, and guiding it in a way that allows it to be some type of a tool that it can wield against China in its endless competition, in this newish, coldish war with China.

What’s your guess? Because there has to be some compelling interest on the other side of this that would justify or make it worth it for the U.S. to torch so much of its Democratic credibility.

MH: I think a consistent theme throughout Pakistani history or Pakistani-U.S. relations is that the U.S. government seems to prefer dealing with the Pakistani military, and I think you see it in other countries too. They historically prefer dealing with the Turkish military. It’s a lot easier to have a single point of contact, as opposed to dealing with a big society which is messy, has different opinions, and different factions. It’s just a lot more convenient.

And, from a military-to-military perspective, the Pakistani military is a relatively functional institution. It has a capacity to produce ordinances and do things that are useful to the U.S. There is a strategic benefit that they can draw upon.

Pakistan is a very poor country, but it has the sixth-largest military in the world. Something that very, very high-ranking, in terms of disproportionate spending on military matters, which is not great for Pakistanis, and it’s resulted in a very, you could say, underfed society, in terms of institutions, and economic growth, and so forth.

But the military is very, very powerful, the intelligence services are very powerful. They’re currently undergoing a very extensive military modernization at the moment, so the money that’s not being invested in sanitation, healthcare, and basic education, things like that, it’s really going into making the military such that it can stay on par with its regional rivals, and see itself as needing to stay on par with the top level of military modernization in the world.

So, from a U.S. perspective, I can see why they like dealing with the Pakistani military, because it’s just very convenient for them. And they don’t want to have to deal with Pakistani society, because Pakistani society will produce someone like Imran Khan, who was put in a very famous cipher — as we wrote about — aggressively neutral about things that the U.S. cares about a lot, like the Ukraine war, which most Pakistanis just don’t want to be involved in, because they don’t see it has anything to do with them.

So, when you have a situation where you can have a country where you have to deal with occasional pushback and occasional resistance to U.S. prerogatives, or you can have a very dependent, very strategically overgrown sort of institution that represents the whole country that is willing to do what you say, and willing to take a more of a junior role, and defer to U.S. prerogatives, I think that the U.S. will choose that.

And I think it’s sort of a problem with many postcolonial countries because, in a lot of colonies — and especially in the British- and French-colonized world — the military was the most built up institution, because that’s what they needed to rule. And then, when the colonizers left, the military was still there, and all these other parliaments and so forth were much, much more nascent and underdeveloped in comparison. So, that’s why you had military domination.

And then, military domination of local politics ended up being an extension of neocolonial control, because, well, we have these close military relationships; a lot of Pakistani military officers traditionally got trained in Britain or the U.S., so they developed these very deep, lasting relations, they developed a culture which was familiar to many U.S. elites, and they kept that relationship going.

And then, if you look at some countries which broke the mold. And it was very critical of things happening in Turkey but the one accomplishment of the Turkish government is breaking the control of the military over society. It’s civilian-controlled now. Pakistan has never reached that level.

And I think that, from an American perspective, while for Pakistan it’s not great, for them it’s kind of good, because if you want to buy arms from Ukraine, Imran Khan won’t do it, the military will, and it is doing that.

RG: I think it points to this interesting phenomenon in U.S. diplomacy, which is laziness or arrogance. Last week on Deconstructed, we talked with the author of a new book on Lumumba and postcolonial Congo. In that situation, you had some interesting overlaps, in the sense that Lumumba, you could describe him as aggressively neutral, just the same way that the State Department described Imran Khan.

With a little bit of diplomatic elbow grease, the United States easily could have worked with Lumumba. Lumumba had an American and a Western orientation that was kind of fundamental to him. We even talked about how he tried to sell all of the Congo’s minerals to an American con artist for, like, $2 billion. He really was not the Soviet sleeper cell that the U.S. pretended he was.

On the one hand, you can say, well, the United States is naïve. They’re paranoid and they just saw communists everywhere, and they hear Imran Khan give an angry speech, and their paranoia makes them think that Imran Khan is a stooge of Putin, or a stooge of China, just like Lumumba was a stooge of the Soviets.

But, to your broader point, they’d rather have somebody that is a slam dunk than somebody who has some neutrality to him that would force them to actually negotiate, country to country, in order to create positive relations between those two countries. It’s much simpler from a diplomatic perspective to just say, you know what? Not so sure about Lumumba. He might be oriented towards us, he might be oriented toward the Soviets, or he might actually just be a Congolese nationalist. Let’s just get somebody in who we don’t even have to wonder about. 

And I think the Pakistani military is somebody that the U.S. just doesn’t have to worry about. It’s just easier to deal with from their perspective.

MH: Yeah, I totally agree.

In the U.S., despite the State Department’s recognition of the Pakistani government, there has been some buildup of pressure over this subject. I think a lot of it driven by the Pakistani diaspora, which is concentrated in certain areas, and sometimes is quite economically or politically influential locally, so you see some members of Congress sort of bringing up pressure on the U.S. government to question more of what happened during the election, and also the circumstances of the entire removal of Imran Khan, what happened after, and potential U.S. involvement.

Can you talk a bit about what you’re seeing and hearing? I know we had a story recently about this, too, talking about a recent letter from Congress about the subject. What are we seeing in terms of internal domestic political division in the U.S., which may, at some point, bring pressure to bear on the Pakistani government to come clean about what’s going on there at the moment?

RG: Right. And the Pakistani diaspora has been incredibly successful. Heavily concentrated in the medical field and, particularly within that, heavily concentrated in the world of physicians and doctors. Well-educated, well-organized block here. But not huge.

I don’t have the numbers at my fingertips, I don’t know if you know what it is, but less than 2 million, maybe even less than a million Pakistanis in the country but, like you said, concentrated in areas like Houston, Northern Virginia, Washington State.

And so, for instance, Abigail Spanberger, CIA analyst-turned-member of Congress who is now running for governor of Virginia has been outspoken in support of Pakistani democracy, and that’s, I think, particularly because of local pressure, local organized pressure from people that she would like to see support her as she moves up the ranks in Virginia.

Greg Casar, a Squad-adjacent or Squad member who represents Austin and San Antonio has been quite outspoken as well. There’s a significant Pakistani population in Texas. Casar was one of the leaders of this letter that circulated that said that the State Department ought not to recognize any Pakistani coalition government until there’s been an independent investigation.

That only wound up with fewer than three dozen members of Congress signing it. That is at once a significant number that can’t be ignored, while also being far fewer than you would need on letters like that for the State Department to be genuinely intimidated by it.

MH: You know, Ryan, for the past year, me and you have been very much in the weeds about Pakistan, more than we ever probably expected to be, based on what’s going on there at the moment.

But it’s interesting; for our listeners who come into it more freshly, last year, me and Ryan reported on a secret document leaked from somewhere in the Pakistani military intelligence complex showing the way that the U.S. had put pressure on its Pakistani counterparts to remove then-Prime Minister Imran Khan from power. It was known as “the cipher,” and Imran Khan himself, before he went to jail, had been talking about it quite regularly.

And, subsequent to that, we did some stories about post-Imran Khan U.S.-Pakistan relations, in terms of the way that the military had switched from Khan’s status of neutrality in the war in Ukraine to becoming an active supplier of arms brokered by the U.S. to the Ukrainian military. And also, some other irregularities, and some other problems with the current charges that Khan is facing, which could have very serious consequences for him at the moment, some serious problems in terms of how those charges are actually substantiated and so forth.

We’ve had these stories, and I think that they’re indicative of very severe divisions inside Pakistan, and great unhappiness with what’s going on in there at the moment from all sectors of society. Not just the general public, but also institutionally and so forth as well. Because, obviously, Pakistan under its current leadership is trying to replicate itself in some sense as a dictatorship, because the once very vocal Pakistani press has been more or less silenced. That’s why this reporting is now being done by people like me and you in the U.S. who have more latitude, and we’re kind of free from that sort of suppression.

But also, the whole pretense of democracy is going out the window, in the sense that we have this parody of democracy instead, far more so a parody than it was maybe any time in history. And it’s interesting because it’s very scary, in a way, because, if you put so much pressure on society on all fronts, it can really kind of blow. And now we’re seeing Pakistan evolve in that direction.

I’m curious, what do you think it’s indicative of, in terms of, if the U.S. continues cosigning it, how it may blow back on America based on past experiences in other countries? But also what the threats and dangers are of Pakistan heading to a situation where it could become very unstable. It’s a nuclear armed country of well over 200 million people.

If you were telling U.S. policymakers why it’s not a good idea to keep cosigning this, what would you indicate to them as some of the major dangers?

RG: I might say, I really hope you know what you’re doing here, because you’re playing an extraordinarily dangerous game with people’s hopes and dreams here.

If you go back to Imran Khan’s removal back in early 2022, that’s followed by extraordinary levels of repression against his movement. Effectively, the complete and total disbandment of his party, the jailing of most of the leaders of the party and. And, in a typical scenario, an autocrat or powerful authorities may expect that that had solved the problem. Levels of repression that extreme in other historical contexts and other countries have been able to effectively smother whatever movement there was that that it represented. That it failed so spectacularly is something that I think the United States needs to take into consideration.

We described the levels of election rigging that went into this before February 8th. The authorities clearly believed that they had done enough to basically destroy the support for Imran Khan and the PTI. Otherwise, they would not have allowed the election commission and the precincts to begin reporting results on election day, and they wouldn’t have allowed the broadcasters to broadcast those results to the entire country. And we know that because, once it was clear that it had been a landslide victory for Imran Khan’s supporters, they barred the election commission from continuing to report numbers, and they barred the broadcasters from continuing to speak, and they shut the internet down.

But, because they had left open that window on election day, the entire country watched the returns come in, and watched Imran Khan’s party picking up a majority of seats in the government. They then had to steal it from out from under that very clear victory that had been presented.

So, the fact that they put that many obstacles in front of people. There are stories of 40 percent of the population is illiterate, and they took away the symbol of the party. And then, on election day, moved people’s polling locations all over the place and shut down mobile service, so people couldn’t text each other, people couldn’t do what they normally did on election day, which is text a particular number and find out where they’re supposed to vote.

We heard stories of how a family in one household would have multiple different precincts that they’d be supposed to vote in, depending on who in that family was voting, and they would be miles and miles and miles apart, sometimes tens of miles apart, extreme long distances. That people were willing to walk over all of that glass to go to vote in an election that most of them believed would actually be stolen from them— That’s the thing. They weren’t naïve, they didn’t go out thinking that it was going to be a free and fair election. They went out assuming it was going to be robbed, yet they went out anyway.

So, now that they are suppressing that mandate and instead putting in this other government raises the question for the United States. OK, now what? How sure are you that this isn’t going to blow? How much do you think you can take this steam and keep it in the kettle? At some point, this thing is going to blow. 

Elections are the way that people let out their steam. And, by getting some directional representation. Like you said, they don’t expect that they’re going to be completely clean and fair elections, but you might expect that, if it’s an absolute landslide victory, that at least they’re allowed some level of something close to representing that. If they’re not, what is left for people to express their democratic impulses, other than violence? Other than the complete disintegration of the institutions that are stitching the country together.

So, to me, they’re really playing with fire here, which goes back to the question of why? To what end? What is on the other side of this for you that makes it worth this extraordinary nuclear-fueled gamble?

MH: It’s very easy to succumb to cynicism and, obviously, the U.S. government seems to become very cynical about the subject.

But you’re right. Pakistanis did so much to vote in this election. It’s kind of touching, actually, the way that people went so out of the way to register what they felt was their vote about their future, and their kid’s future, and so forth, and despite the knowledge that they knew no one was going to respect it, they just wanted to make sure that people heard. And to turn away from that and to reject it so forthrightly, it’s very disillusioning. It’s something that I think I’ve noticed, you’ve noticed, and we all have.

One thing I wanted to ask you: This whole reporting on Pakistan, for me — and I’m curious about your perspective — is very eye-opening in many ways, because I think we saw a lot, not just about Pakistan, but about the U.S. in the situation, and the U.S. media as well, too. Because The Intercept reported on the cipher document and many other classified documents, and we reported on the Pakistani election. I think we’re one of the few outlets which bothered to report on this. It’s one of the most important— the fifth biggest country in the world by population had a fraudulent election, had the deposal of a very popular prime minister with U.S. involvement.

I think other outlets either could not report on it for technical reasons — in the sense that it’s very difficult to do some of the reporting we did for security and other purposes — but also, it seems like they were just adverse to doing it. And there’s a reason why the reporting came to The Intercept, because we were capable, but also we had an interest.

And it made me think that, if people in Pakistan can’t rely on their own media now — because for very obvious reasons, the military is crushing the media there and made it very dangerous; reporters have been killed, they’ve been abducted, it’s a situation like that there — but in the U.S., where we are free, and we are very involved in the situation, there’s been incuriosity, complicity, I would say, also, with what’s going on. You’re going up there to the State Department every week, and yelling at the State Department, Vedant and Mark Miller, and so forth.

Where are the rest of the people? Where is the rest of the U.S. press? They know very, very well that their own government is involved in cosigning this very unjust situation, but they’re absent.

I’m curious about your own perspective, but this is very strange to me, in a way. How is it that The Intercept has become maybe the last bastion of free speech for Pakistanis, and even for American involvement, of knowing what’s going on with their country in this other country?

RG: Maybe if some of these media outlets recognize that there is a really active diaspora that is hungry for this coverage, that could help in the future to get them a little bit more interested in doing some of this coverage. There’s the obvious old saw that U.S. readers generally are not given much to read about when it comes to American foreign affairs, either because they’ve been trained not to care about it, or they just don’t care about it either way. I think editors look at Pakistan as just not remotely interesting.

I was actually talking to a top editor at one of the major papers who edits and helps guide coverage in this area. What she explained to me was, look, for a couple of years, it was Ukraine, now it’s Israel, Palestine, it’s Gaza. And, if it doesn’t fit directly into that, then there really isn’t any appetite among editors at the top papers to cover it. There are all sorts of interesting intersections between the story of Pakistan and Ukraine. We covered the entire affair, the entire deposal, coming from Pakistan’s unwillingness to be 100 percent supportive of the Ukraine war effort, and trying to stay neutral, and then, later, secretly making weapons for Ukraine. But, as she said, that’s kind of complicated, that’s not a quick daily piece we can do.

And when it comes to Gaza, one of the most popular if not the most popular Muslim elected officials in the world is Imran Khan, and to not have his voice at this moment, I think, changes the way that, at minimum, the Muslim world is able to respond to what’s going on. It’s hard to say what the effect would be of having him in office, in power, at this moment; I’d be curious for your take on that.

But those are not close enough tie-ins from the perspective of these major media outlets for it to warrant any attention.

MH: Yeah. It’s disappointing, because then we don’t cover these subjects, the media doesn’t cover these subjects. And then, when something happens later on, they’re very surprised, but with the context where no one really has the information that led to it.

Yeah. To your point, I do think if Imran Khan was free at the moment and was able to speak, he’d be very voluble at what’s going on. because he was never one to censor himself or to hold back about his opinions about affairs well beyond Pakistan’s border, which I guess was what annoyed the U.S. State Department and U.S. officials so much about him, and led to the predicament he’s in now.

RG: And annoyed some of the Arab states as well. They would rather prefer to not think about, for instance, Kashmir, or not to think about the Palestinian question. Palestinians were getting in the way of the Abraham Accords, and Imran Khan would embarrass them in front of their own populations by refusing to just go along with these two, in some ways, interestingly-related impulses from the West. To say, look, OK, we’re not going to solve these problems, let’s ignore them, pre-October-7th. Let’s just pretend they’re not happening. And Imran Khan was unwilling to do that.

MH: Ryan, thanks again for joining us in this crossover episode. It’s like The Flintstones meets The Simpsons. Those cartoons when you’re a kid, I love those episodes. So, it’s like that one again.

RG: Which one is which?

MH: I think you’re Flintstones. I think you’re Flintstones, and I’m Homer.

RG: Sounds good. That sounds perfect.

MH: That was The Intercept’s Ryan Grim, D.C. Bureau Chief and host of Deconstructed. And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow and Elizabeth Sanchez. And this episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

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Thanks so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Murtaza Hussain.