Ghosts That Haunt Pakistan

CAMBRIDGE, England

FOUNDER Pakistan’s first leader was the patrician Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

ON VIEW Eisenhower with Ayub Khan, left. Supporters recall Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, right.

WHEN Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, the killers struck in Rawalpindi, an ancient garrison town, on the edge of a leafy park named for another Pakistani who had served as prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan; he was assassinated in the park in 1951. Barely a mile away, Ms. Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, another former prime minister, was hanged in 1979 at the city’s central jail. One of the doctors who failed to reanimate Ms. Bhutto at a Rawalpindi hospital was the son of a doctor who similarly failed to save Liaquat Ali Khan.

The killings varied widely — Liaquat Ali Khan was shot by a Pashtun separatist; Mr. Bhutto was hanged after a court appointed by a military dictator found him guilty of murdering a minor political opponent from Baluchistan; and the question of who sent the suicide bomber and the gunman who attacked Ms. Bhutto on Dec. 27 is the subject of an investigation in which the Pakistani police will be assisted by experts from Scotland Yard.

Still, the historic coincidence of all three leaders dying in Rawalpindi, in the same quarter of the city, has underscored how often violent death has reshaped the political map of Pakistan, and, too, how slender is the thread that sustains the country’s hopes of establishing a stable democracy.

For 60 years since its founding in the partitioning of British India, Pakistan has seesawed between military dictatorships and elected governments, and now new hope for stability is being placed on the chance that democracy there can be revived.

But while attention is currently focused on the failings of Pervez Musharraf, the latest in a long line of military rulers, Pakistan’s civilian leaders, too, have much to account for in the faltering history of Pakistani democracy. Over the decades, their own periods in office have been notable mostly for their weakness, their instinct for political score-settling, and their venality.

Now more than ever, hopes of the country achieving lasting stability weigh far beyond Pakistan’s border. For the United States, the stakes include the prospects of prevailing against Al Qaeda and the Taliban along Pakistan’s Afghan border; linked to that is the sobering issue of who will control Pakistan’s nuclear armory.

With President Musharraf facing mounting popular opposition, the United States has used its influence to persuade him that the best and perhaps only hope of restoring stability is to allow a revival of a form of democracy — elections for a new government that would co-exist with him as president. It is a long shot, and the odds against it have lengthened considerably with the killing of Ms. Bhutto. But even as plans for an election proceed, there is reason to fear that a return to elected government would be anything but a panacea.

While widely lauded in the West, Pakistan’s current generation of civilian politicians — indeed, most of its civilian political leaders, going back to the country’s origins in the partition of British India in 1947 — have repeatedly failed to bring the stability and prosperity they have promised. And the reasons for their failure, many who know Pakistan’s history have concluded, rest about as heavily with the politicians as with the generals.

As much as anybody in Pakistan’s history, Ms. Bhutto built a reputation as a campaigner for democracy, and it is for that that she has been principally eulogized. Twice prime minister in the 1990’s before moving into self-exile abroad, she returned in October saying she hoped to rescue Pakistan from nearly a decade of rule by Mr. Musharraf, one of four generals who have held near-absolute power for just over half of Pakistan’s existence. But her death raises anew the question that has dogged Pakistan from its founding: when, or perhaps whether, Pakistan will begin the long march toward building a democracy worthy of the name.

The legend cultivated by Pakistani politicians like Ms. Bhutto and her principal civilian rival, Nawaz Sharif, cast the generals as the main villains in stifling democracy, emerging from their barracks to grab power out of Napoleonic ambition and contempt for the will of ordinary Pakistanis. It is a version of history calculated to appeal strongly to Western opinion. But it has been carefully drawn to excuse the role the politicians themselves have played in undermining democracy, by using mandates won at the polls to establish governments that rarely amounted to much more than vehicles for personal enrichment, or for pursuing vendettas against political foes.

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