William Dalrymple

If it has achieved little else, George Bush’s “war on terror’’ has at least succeeded in mating some unlikely bedfellows. Who, a few years ago, could imagine the strange coupling of the British Labour party and the neocons? Or the love-in between the House of Bush and the House of Saud? An equally bizarre alliance is now to be found in Pakistan. The liberal elite, somewhat to its astonishment, has suddenly found a new affection for the military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf. Travel through the country today, talk to the journalists and opinion-makers, and you will find surprisingly little enthusiasm for the resumption of full democracy, which - under US pressure - looks likely to take place in 2007.

It is not that Pakistan’s liberals approve of military dictatorships. These were the people who took to the streets to resist General Zia ul-Haq. But the democratic politics of Pakistan throughout the 1990s proved so violent, so corrupt and so socially and economically disastrous that Musharraf’s rule is now widely regarded as the least awful option.

Certainly, few middle-class Pakistanis have much relish for the return of Benazir Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif, the leaders who took Pakistan to the brink of collapse in the 90s. There are good reasons for this. Ten years ago, at the height of Bhutto’s rule, the corruption monitoring organisation Transparency International named Pakistan as the second most corrupt country in the world. At the same time, Amnesty International accused the government of massive human rights abuse, with one of the world’s worst records of custodial deaths, extrajudicial killings and torture. Moreover, Bhutto and her husband were charged with plundering the country to buy European estates and townhouses.

It was difficult to imagine Bhutto’s successor, Nawaz Sharif, making a bigger hash of things, but he quickly succeeded, harassing his political opponents, dismissing judges and threatening journalists.

Sharif also moved Pakistan closer to Islamist policies, entrenching sharia in the legal system. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency presided over the growth of jihadi groups, believing them to be the most cost-effective way of tying down the Indian army in Kashmir and exerting Pakistani influence in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the economy teetered towards collapse.

Behind this succession of crises lay the bigger problem of a fundamentally flawed political system where land-owning remains the only social base from which politicians can emerge. The educated middle class - which in India seized control in 1947 - is in Pakistan still largely excluded from the political process.

In contrast, Musharraf’s record in bringing the country back from the brink has been impressive. Under the urbane eye of Shaukat Aziz, formerly the vice-president of Citibank and now prime minister, Pakistan is enjoying a construction and consumer boom, with growth approaching 7 per cent - although some of this has been generated by the mass repatriation of Pakistani drug fortunes after the tightening of money-laundering regulations in the US and the Gulf. Sectarian violence is down, the jihadis have been restrained and the ISI, which encouraged them, has been partially reformed. Press criticism has been tolerated.

It has certainly not been an unblemished record. Musharraf has made many unwise compromises with the Muslim ulema, and in two provinces has entered into an alliance with the hardline Islamist MMA. Musharraf has failed even to attempt sorting out the country’s disastrously inadequate education and health system; instead the army is spending money on a fleet of American F-16s. The Pakistani human rights record remains aby-smal. But few can really dispute that Musharraf’s rule has brought Pakistan better governance and a gre-ater degree of stability and press freedom than it has enjoyed for many years.

The wider lesson to be drawn from this is that while US support for democracy is preferable to its previous policy of bolstering client autocracies, electoral democracy is not on its own an automatic panacea. As Pakistan shows, rigged, corrupt, unrepresentative and flawed democracies without the strong independent institutions of a civil society - a free press, an independent judiciary, an empowered election commission - can foster governments that are every bit as tyrannical as any dictatorship.

In Pakistan, democracy has meant a kind of elective feudalism. In Lebanon, the eccentric electoral system, rigged in the Maronites’ favour, has made it impossible for the majority Shias to achieve power. In Iraq, the electoral system fails to reflect the popular mandate, and the means by which it was imposed has led many of the Sunni community to disfranchise themselves.

It is a similar situation in Afghanistan, where the elected government of President Hamid Karzai has as bad a record of torture and custodial deaths as any of its predecessors (although much of the worst torture is taking place in US bases, outside Afghan sovereignty). — The Guardian