At present, the army has adopted a low profile because its reputation has sunk along with its erstwhile chief Pervez Musharraf. But though the army has delinked itself from Musharraf, it is unlikely to allow the politicians to bully him either. All said and done he is one of theirs and everything he did had the sanction of the Corps Commanders Conference, Pakistan’s other parliament.

Kanishk Tharoor points to the secular message of the election results:

In the supposed Islamist heartlands of the North-West Frontier Provinces and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Islamists won less than 5% of the vote. Instead, the secular Pashtun nationalist ANP made huge gains after a costly week in which the party’s candidates and supporters came under routine attack from militants. The secular PPP also made large gains in the region.

Soniah Kamal writes on the past record of the Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, and concludes that despite their flaws, a dictator is still a dictator.

Let us then remind ourselves of the years 1990, 1993, 1996, 1999 when either the late Benazir Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif were unceremoniously dismissed from power. In all cases, far from an uproar most Pakistanis then were rather complacent if not outright pleased. Well, here we are, 2008, and the same parties are in the majority again and this time the army, savior-in-general, is also in the doghouse. Not that the army should ever be the solution to end a democratically elected government no matter how botched a job they’re doing. As Pakistan has witnessed in the recent past, a dictator, no matter how benevolent, is at the end of the day a dictator

Eric de Bruyn, an observer sent by the left wing of the Flemish Socialist Party, writing at ‘The Emergency Times’ points to the massive rigging that he witnessed:

However, the worst was yet to come. In the evening I went to the central counting office of the NA 257 district. What I saw and photographed there defies everything imaginable. Stacks of bags full of election forms were broken open. Forms were being filled in or changed in the corridors of the court hall. Other original forms were thrown away. Thanks to our pressure and the presence of the local media, a local president of the polling station was arrested and taken away. But will it surprise you to learn that the PPP candidate Riaz Lund, who in the evening was winning with 15,000 votes in 50 out of the 198 polling stations, has officially lost the election?