LONDON, 1 January 2008 - The brutal assassination of Benazir Bhutto on Thursday in Rawalpindi has seen the most powerful dynasty in Pakistani political history laid to rest at least for a generation.
With her father and two brothers similarly experiencing violent premature ends to their lives, there are no more Bhuttos left willing to carry on the dynastic mantle with immediacy. Benazir's only surviving sibling, Sanam, is disinterested in Pakistani politics and prefers to live in Dubai.
The world will have to wait for the next generation of Bhuttos to emerge - the offspring of Benazir's elder brother, Murtaza, and her own children - that is assuming they have the same political genes of their charismatic elders.
There is a precedent in dynastic politics on the subcontinent from which the Bhutto clan could well do to learn - that of the even more famous but equally tragic Nehru/Gandhi dynasty in neighboring India.
Mother India herself - Indira Gandhi - too was assassinated by one of her Sikh guards. Her youngest son and heir apparent, Sanjay, died in a light plane crash, which he was piloting. And her eldest son, Rajiv, who followed in her footsteps in politics was similarly assassinated - blown up by a Tamil suicide bomber during an election campaign rally.
There were no more Gandhis from the immediate family to take over. The two wives, Maneka, married to Sanjay and a one-time environment minister, and Sonia, Rajiv's widow and the current chair of the ruling Congress Party, found it nigh impossible to follow in their husbands' footsteps, simply because they were merely married into the Gandhi clan. They both tried. Maneka became estranged from the family and party. Italian-born Sonia could have become India's prime minister but wisely declined after the Congress Party won the last election because the opposition BJP raised the chauvinistic specter of India being ruled by a "foreigner".
In this context, the implication for Asif Zardari, Benazir's grieving husband, is that he should not be tempted to carry on the political mantle of his martyred wife. That would be a miscalculation of enormous proportions not only for the Pakistan People's Party but for the country per se.
For, Zardari neither has the charisma, nor grassroots constituency, nor the political genes of the Bhutto clan. The whole world knows that the Bhutto/Zardari betrothal was a "marriage of political convenience" and the mother of all matrimonial mismatches. Educationally, intellectually and socially, the Harvard and Oxford-educated Benazir towered over her spouse.
The tragic events in Rawalpindi expose two important but festering issues about contemporary Pakistan - the nature of its governance and the state of its political parties and culture.
Given the turbulent 60-year history of the country since partition, the questions that beg are: "Is Pakistan ungovernable?" Is Pakistan a perpetually dysfunctional state?
These questions should not be confused with the strength and the sustainability of the Pakistan state per se, which is strong and of course nuclear, albeit controlled pervasively by the armed forces.
Pakistan is unfortunate in that it did not have an established infrastructure of statehood at birth. As such, it had a massive disadvantage compared to India, which inherited most of the bureaucracy, civil service, judiciary and press - with all their warts - of the Raj.
The British in their hasty retreat from Empire, effectively frog-marched the two entities into partition. And Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the first leader of Pakistan, fell for it the hardest.
It is perhaps revealing that the army has been the most dominating institution in Pakistani politics in its short history. Perhaps this was not the legacy, which the founder of the Pakistani state had envisaged. But this almost single-handedly stunted the development of civilian institutions, especially political parties.
Those that eventually flourished, largely due to the pressure from the West, had the misfortune to be established by strong feudal clans who virtually controlled the two most powerful states in the country - Sindh and Punjab. With the result these parties are centrally dominated by two families who have a healthy disregard for delegation of power. How ironic that both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif claimed to be the torchbearers of the restoration of democracy in Pakistan, and yet their own internal party structures are the most undemocratic.
Others tried to join the frame. The Mohajirs launched the MQM but were soon sidelined as usurpers in a spate of violence, especially in Karachi. The Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami has never had a constituency of substance and fortunately remains a marginal force, perhaps also indicating that the majority of Pakistanis prefer the middle road to politics and governance.
As to the answers to the above questions, they are unfortunately both in the affirmative, at least for the moment. Both the army and the civilian parties have failed the Pakistani people and democratic governance. And there is hardly a flicker of light at the end of the tunnel.
The role model for the Pakistan Army is Turkey, especially under the Kemalist revolution of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Even in its current manifestation, Gen. Pervez Musharraf is clearly trying to emulate what Kenan Evren, the last Turkish general to stage a military coup in 1980, did in Turkey. The similarities are uncanny, but up to a point. The Turkish Army is much more organized, resourced, bigger, and sophisticated. And Turkish civilian parties, after decades of in-built ideological rivalries, seemed to have learned the lessons of yesteryear.
The current AK Party government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for instance, in July won a landslide election after it took on the powerful army over a constitutional issue. Erdogan won because he put the electorate first, who were more interested in the management of the economy, job creation and the cost and standard of living. The opposition Republican People's Part, pandering to the army, tried to raise the specter of creeping fundamentalism, which of course backfired badly.
When last did a Pakistani military regime or a civilian government put the interests of the Pakistani people first? Never before! Pakistan needs a period of reflection. To reach a better quality of civilian rule, will require a revolution of mindset - not only of the army and the political parties, but perhaps more so of the middle classes, the backbone of any tax-paying democracy, and the extra-parliamentary institutions such as the NGOs.
Pakistani political culture, like several other developing countries, is too easily infused with blind emotion rather than sober reflection that inevitably leads to wanton violence and destruction.
Failure of the above stakeholders in Pakistan is too horrendous to contemplate. Dysfunctional governance is the oxygen that fuels alienation and extremism. A lack of accountable government; free and fair elections; strong state institutions; an independent judiciary; law and order; freedom of the press; a vibrant political culture; an open society; and efficient economic management similarly give rise to corruption, despair and militancy, because, they are the willing occupants of political vacuums.
Political restoration in Pakistan has a long and tortuous journey ahead. No one should kid themselves about this. Just consider the moral nadir to which the country has degenerated. The specter of Muslims murdering Muslims in a mosque during prayers. The only other countries where this is currently happening are Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia.
