The New Nation - Internet Edition

The return of Benazir Bhutto from the political dead has been wondrous to behold, Ten years ago she had been sacked as prime minister, her brother had been gunned down by her own police; her husband was in prison on corruption charges; and her Swiss bank accounts had been frozen at the request of the Pakistan government. When the heroine of the struggle against the dictatorship of Ziaul-Haq visited Britain, ministers failed to return her calls.

A decade on, she is the darling of the western media once more, leading the opposition to another US-backed military ruler and somehow, at the same time, the last hope of the US and British governments of keeping a grip on the upheaval engulfing Pakistan. As she was told by a senior US official at her lowest point in the late 1990s; "We can whitewash you in 24 hours if we need to."

But events are not playing out quite as Washington intended. The sweetheart deal it stitched together between the former prime minister and the shopworn dictator was meant to produce a power sharing arrangement that would keep the army on side but offer a little legitimacy to General Pervez Musharraf's discredited rule. For Bhutto, it offered a route back to power and the dropping of corruption cases against her. Many in her Pakistan People's Party balked at this backchannel accommodation with the enemy. But in private meetings with close supporters, she recalled that her more radical father had been hanged "in the night, like Saddam Hussein" for defying the US and that this was the way to get back and do something for the country. Her presence in Pakistan, she said, would create a new dynamic.

Which it certainly has, if not quite as her western sponsors intended. Musharraf's declaration of martial law barely two weeks after Bhutto's tumultous return to Karachi was a last throw of the dice to stop the Supreme Court striking down his rigged re-election. But the violent crackdown, the arrest of thousands of activists, the closure of independent TV stations and the street confrontations with striking lawyers have united the opposition to the dictatorship. Bhutto's response has been to mobilise her party machine behind the protest movement, abandon all talk of negotiation, insist she would not serve as prime minister under the general, and call for Musharraf to go. She has thus stanched her loss of support over the perception that she was propping up the dictator, and put herself again at the head of a popular democratic movement. Not surprisingly, there is still skepticism about whether her break with Musharraf is final and the protests, dominated by the middle class and party activists, have yet to draw in wider mass support.

But this is certainly not what the US had in mind for pivotal a state in its 'war on terror" Bush's calls to Musharraf to abandon his dictatorial ways and press ahead with free elections clearly lack all credibility. Not only has the US been Musharraf's principal backer, channeling nearly $11 bn worth of aid to his regime since 2001, but it is widely accepted that any genuine withdrawal of US support would finish the general off is short order. I wonder Bush his sent has deputy secretary of state, John Negroponte, to try to knock his clients heads together.

For the US Pakistan has been a woeful foreign policy failure Musharraf has now conceded that nuclear armed Pakistan is becoming a failed state, far from being a bulwark against jihadist terror, Pakistan is one of the two countries most closely associated with the rise and entrenchment of al-Qaida the second being that other dependable American ally, Saudi Arabia.

For Pakistan, the US relationship has been a deepening disaster; its exploitation as a strategic asset against the Soviet Union and India in the past and now as part of the US attempt to control Afghanistan and the wider Middle East, has been a central factor in its stifling by a bloated anti-democratic military. It can be no surprise that hostility to the US role in the country is so over-whelming, though that is in no way articulated by its unloved political elites.

If there was ever a country begging for radical social transformation, Pakistan is surely it. Its potential has been ruthlessly stunted by feudal land ownership and parasitic moneymen, a third of its 160 million people go hungry, 44% are living below the poverty line, half the population is literate and barely one in two girls goes to school. Such conditions demand a sweeping programme of land reform and public investment in social welfare, health and education. Instead Pakistan gets corrupt, knockdown privatisations and most western aid goes to the army. Bhutto has been arguing the case for large-scale public welfare programmes paid for through deficit financing. But given her record in power, there is much cynicism about such commitments, while no other mainstream political force offers genuine social alternative.

Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Pakistan's former high commissioner in London and Bhutto confidant, believes Musharraf will be gone within days. If so, Bhutto and the other traditional leaders will struggle to meet the pent-up demand for change. If Hasan proves over-optimistic and Musharraf digs in with American support, the possibiity of a wider popular uprising is likely to grow-and with it, the chance of real and necessary political change.

-Guardian Weekly