Breakthrough in Pakistan

In keeping with Islamic practice, men and women voted separately in this week’s national election in Pakistan, but nothing else about it was the least bit traditional. By far the most orderly, peaceful and fraud-free election in Pakistan’s 41 year history, it will set a standard for the rest of the developing world and should move Pakistan one step closer to democracy after more than a decade of dictatorial rule. And the election may yet bring to power the Muslim world’s first woman prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, if she is able to forge a ruling coalition from her party’s 92-seat plurality in the National Assembly.

Bhutto praised the people of Pakistan for keeping the election clean and free of the violence that has marred previous elections, but she clearly deserves some of the credit. This campaign could have been a blood feud, considering that the chief rival of her Pakistan People’s Party was the Islamic Democratic Alliance, whose members helped overthrow her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in 1977, later engineered his execution and briefly imprisoned her. But Benazir Bhutto cautioned restraint at every turn and urged her followers to win fair and square rather than try to steal National Assembly seats. Even after it became apparent Thursday that some ballot boxes in the Punjab had been tampered with, perhaps costing her party some seats, she counseled party loyalists to challenge the results in the courts, not settle their differences in the streets.

Violence is still possible, of course, if Bhutto is unable to put together a coalition government or if Pakistan’s acting president, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, denies her the opportunity to try. The pressures on him are mounting as it becomes clearer that Bhutto’s party overwhelmed the Islamic Democratic Alliance. So far, Ishaq Khan has been completely evenhanded, even though for years he was the closest civilian adviser to the late Zia ul-Haq, the general who led the coup against Bhutto’s father and who died three months ago in an airplane crash that was officially blamed on sabotage. Zia’s loyalists in the nine-party opposition alliance made Bhutto’s sex the focus of their campaign and cited the teachings of conservative Islamic scholars against a woman prime minister. But Ishaq Khan pointedly noted last week that nothing in the Pakistani constitution bars women from leadership roles and added, “I think a woman prime minister might be a good change.”

For U.S. policy-makers, who had anxiously watched the election in America’s closest South Asian ally, the absence of post-election turbulence must be a relief. What is going on in Pakistan these days is the sort of political maneuvering and coalition-building that Americans have come to expect in Western Europe, Israel and other democracies, not in the Third World. If the restraint continues, if Pakistan’s military remains as detached as it was all during the campaign and if a government is formed quickly, then this election may be recorded as a turning point in Pakistan’s history, no matter who emerges as prime minister.