THE GENERALS' ELECTION

Mahnaz Ispahani wonders, now that General Zia is gone, whether the army will allow democracy

PAKISTAN'S brief life has had a tragic cast. The country has survived dismember- ment (Bangladesh's victory in 1971 was the only successful secession since the second world war), wars with India, insurgency, and a persistent crisis of political identity. The death of President General Zia ul-Haq (and many senior military officers) has left Pakistan's civil society and military author- ities at a loss. When dictators die, the air seems filled with the apprehension of freedom; but that is partly a sign that a people have forgotten how to take respon- sibility for themselves.

For more than half the years of Pakis- tan's existence, generals — Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan and Zia ul-Haq — have ruled it. They were the self-appointed successors to the constitutional democrat, Moham- med Ali Jinnah, the founder of the state, who once envisioned a strong, democratic, Muslim nation on the subcontinent.

Today Pakistan is again passing through what has become its customary style of succession: unexpected, uncertain, without rules or direction. No Pakistani leader has ever ceded power voluntarily. Free, party- based, elections, too, have had a pitiful history; they culminated in a secession in 1971 and in a coup d'etat in 1977. These successive political crises emerged from the country's ignoble pattern of civil-military relations. The Pakistan army apparently cannot be kept down, or confined to barracks. In 1971 it suffered great blows: its soldiers behaved as butchers in Bang- ladesh, then surrendered to India, and then, as the coup de grace, 90,000 of them became prisoners of war. Out of this debacle rose the charismatic socialist, Zul- figar Ali Bhutto. His choice to head the army was a junior general named Zia ul-Haq. By 1977 the army had revived sufficiently to knock Bhutto off his high perch. (He was hanged under Zia's eyes in 1979.) Now the deaths of Zia and his senior generals have again left the army bereft.

Will Pakinstan's army step aside to lick its wounds, or will it stay on? This army, the ostensible heir, like its Indian counterpart, of the British tradition of military profes- sionalism and of the subordination of military power to civilian authority, is likely always to be the final arbiter of Pakistan's politics. It will decide, yet again, whether to give Jinnah's vision another chance.

Pakistani political culture is an incendi- ary mix of popular aspirations to participa- tion (which Bhutto aroused and consoli- dated) and feudal conservatism (to which he was born, and to which, ultimately, he acceded). Autocracy and urban riots are its characteristic features. Taking the demo- cratic route now could mean instability.

Much will depend on how Pakistan's poli- tical aspirants negotiate a modus vivendi among their bickering parties, and with the army. Benazir Bhutto is the principal candidate for the crown, and the deter- mined carrier of her father's bloodied, secular, populist mantle. She is the passion of many and the horror of many. She knows that she cannot make it to Islama- bad without the army's acquiescence.

If they are wooed and won, if party- based elections are held on 16 November, Benazir and the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) could come to power. Ironically, such a victory would constitute a return to old-style leadership. It was Zia, the pious, greying soldier of Islam, schooled and trained in the subcontinent, who repre- sented — for the first time in Pakistan's history — the rule of the indigenous middle class, with all its assets and all its flaws.

Benazir, by contrast, is a youthful throw- back to earlier times. She is the product of a feudal past, of an elite, of Harvard and Oxford.

The next ruler of Pakistan will have to contend with trouble at home and abroad.

Inside Pakistan, ethnic groups are at war; the industrial, king-maker city of Karachi is crippled; and the province of Sind is desperately unhappy. Corruption — from black money, drugs and guns — is corrod- ing the society and distorting the economy.

Tensions are high in the region. India is enraged over alleged Pakistani assistance to Sikh terrorists in the Indian Punjab, and Pakistan accuses India of abetting trouble- makers in Sind. There is a small, icy, mountain war along the Siachin Glacier in the Karakorams, and a continuing contest for superior nuclear position. Meanwhile, the firm international focus on Pakistan during the occupation of Afghanistan is waning. The human costs of the Afghan war for this 'front-line' state have been high: refugees, Kalashnikovs, drugs, bombings, and terrorism have all spread from Peshawar to Karachi. Mean- while, Mr Gorbachev takes his troops from Afghanistan, and talks sweetly with the Americans. And, except in so far as the United States cares about the next Kabul regime, its interest in Afghanistan also dies a little with the departure of each Soviet soldier. Certain geopolitical interests will be prosecuted, of course, but the Amer- ican Congress's desire to keep Pakistan awash in money and weapons on the scale of Israel, Egypt, or Turkey will also abate.

Unlike Khomeini's Iran, Zia's Pakistan was a good and irreplaceable friend of the United States; Zia's loyalties beyond his borders were unaffected by his zealous commitment to Islamisation at home. Be- nazir, the leader of a large anti-American constituency, has begun to express her previously masked enthusiasm for the Un- ited States. Once she thought of America demonologically, but she now speaks more warmly about it, and more often about its role in furthering Pakistani democracy.

Benazir may get her chance to lead. She Will face special challenges as a woman (and as a mother) in a conservative Muslim nation of 107 million. But the Political drama in which she was to play the heroine has lost its villain. With Zia's death, the simplistic, sentimental politics Of the wounded daughter will have to become the politics of platforms, party organisation and programmes. In all these areas, however, Benazir has been vague. The PPP is often divided against itself and in conflict with other opposition parties. Benazir's foreign policy agenda includes a curb on the nuclear weapons programme and a new attentiveness to the United States. These priorities do not much please her colleagues and supporters. In power, Will she be able 10 hold to her views?

Benazir is capable of uniting the opposi- tion to form a coalition civilian govern- ment. But she has a discouraging reputa- tion as something of a despot. It is said that she brooks no criticism. She must decide, then, whether an ascent to power by democratic means will translate into demo- cratic rule. Moreover, those old devils of Pakistani politics, factions and demago- gues, are sure to haunt the party in power. They could provide the army with another excuse to intervene. Pakistan has swung fitfully between civilian autocracy and military dictatorship. Will democratic gov- ernment succeed this time? Or will another general step out of the wings to declare that Pakistan, and Islam, are in danger? If SO, we know the rest.

Mahnaz Ispahani works for the Institute of Strategic Studies.