Pakistan's former Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, returned to Karachi to large crowds yesterday in anticipation of a joyous start to her party's campaign for January's parliamentary elections. A bomb blast on the road to a mass gathering injured hundreds, and the death toll continues to mount.
As the carnage is catalogued and the roads cleaned, the blaming has begun. Bhutto has already accused the late General Mohamed Zia up Haq's henchmen for the bombing, and General Pervez Musharaff -offering his first condolences to Bhutto rather than the Pakistani people -- has blamed Al Qaeda. Neither Bhutto nor Musharaff has yet gotten around to blaming the other, but that will soon come, too.
The distinction does make a difference. Bhutto has identified her personal adversaries -- local to Pakistan, particular to her own history -- as the cause of yesterday's catastrophe. Musharaff has identified international terrorists, the object of years of international attention and in a small way, his own antagonists, as perpetrators of yesterday's violence. Bhutto, first indirectly and then directly, blamed Musharaff as well for allowing Zia's men to remain in the army, and perhaps in the government.
Intelligence analysts will quickly point to the many ways that these groups intersect, but from the point of view of Pakistan's politics, each accusation sets a context for political battles to come.
If this autumn's awkward alliance between Bhutto and Musharaff has become a symbol of Pakistan's weak governance, yesterday's debacle is a metaphor for the vast chasm that separates the general and the politician. Musharaff, so keen to maintain power that he has been willing to violate all the common precepts of participatory politics, wanted Bhutto back, but also wanted an overlay of control over the raucousness of politics. Having agreed to her return, he nonetheless wanted her to postpone her arrival and avoid Karachi's roads, its threats and its people.
Bhutto had other ideas. Even under explicit threats, no politician returning from eight years of exile would agree to helicopter to a rally. The people, after all, are what makes politics real -- they are the engine that fuels any possibility that Pakistan might one day achieve a representative democracy. So Bhutto shunned the government's offer of a helicopter and by most accounts, the bulletproof cabin that was to remove her threats, and her adoring supporters.
Control versus chaos: for eight long years of army rule -- like the decades of the 1960s and the 1980s -- Pakistan's military has tried to keep a lid on the country's politics. It has always justified its power by pointing to the turmoil and confusion that it believes civilian government brings to an otherwise acceptable state. Because civilians have never managed to run Pakistan like a military battalion -- order, command and control - the army's top brass have been willing, time and again, to substitute themselves for elected leaders.
This is the mentality that Bhutto always claimed to fight against, and she has paid for it in many, many ways: imprisonment and exile, of course, and before that, military efforts to contain her authority or remove her from office. They army's belief that she may not have governed during either of her terms in office well might have been true. Her strong belief that the army has no right to determine what Pakistan's voters want has, until this year, fueled her ambitions and those of her political party.
Until now, that is. Musharaff and Bhutto are now odd-fellow allies in a campaign to let him maintain his job as president and -- possibly -- let her seek a third term as Prime Minister. The courts are already hearing cases that could scotch this deal, but even before they rule, street politics may easily take over. Bhutto's reputation is based on the popular belief that she fundamentally abhors dictatorship -- but she has now struck a deal with a dictator to bring about political change slowly, and in managed sort of way. Her feistiness (and political acuity) comes through in her insistence that the general remove his uniform -- but his refusal to do so before manipulating a presidential election earlier this month did not stop her from returning to begin her party's parliamentary campaign.
Musharaff, for his part, has tried to play on her vanities, concentrating his wooing on her personal ambitions more than her political aspirations. He has promulgated an ordinance to remove corruption charges against her but not against their mutual opponent, former Prime Minister Mian Mohammed Nawaz Sharif. But he has not yet reworked the Constitution -- a document he otherwise respects more in the breach than in the norm -- to allow her to stand for a third term. The courts, meanwhile, have yet to decide whether his re-election was valid, and the corruption ordinance maintainable. Until these are settled, Bhutto's future remains an unknown.
And the parliament? The Musharaff-Bhutto deal was meant, in its own odd way, to reinforce the importance of upcoming elections -- but the importance of parliament itself is still an unknown. Musharaff, as president, has used parliament as a rubber stamp, effortlessly inserted and removed prime ministers by will and whim, and largely ignored the primacy of parliament that was clearly intended by the 1973 Constitution (passed, by the way, by Bhutto's father's parliament).
The stage is set, therefore, for quite an autumn. The politician and the general have agreed on only a few things. Most of the critical elements of Pakistan's political future have yet to be discussed publicly: the ways establish political stability based on popular representation, the nature of the internal terrorist threat and ways to understand and confront militancy, and Pakistan's role in global politics. These are jobs for parliaments, far more than presidents. Whether Bhutto can be the catalyst for change -- with or without Musharaff, whom she doesn't trust, or Nawaz Sharif's party, which she doesn't trust, either -- or the countless other political players who are soon to come out of the woodwork after eight years of hibernation -- will depend in no small measure on how she and her alleged partner, the general, face the coming days.