Pakistan Addressing the Future, Avenging the Past

"Stand up to the challenge. Fight against overwhelming odds. Overcome the enemy." The late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto regularly exhorted his eldest daughter with such maxims. Benazir proved to be a keen listener. "In the stories my father had told us over and over again," she writes in her new autobiography, Benazir Bhutto: Daughter of the East, "good always triumphed over evil."

To Benazir Bhutto, last week's national elections in Pakistan must have seemed the storybook fulfillment of her father's fantasies. In the first truly free elections since the late President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq began his eleven years of autocratic rule, voters catapulted her Pakistan People's Party to dominance in the nation's politics and put Bhutto within reach of the prime- ministership once held by her beloved father. Dreams do come true. Scores do get settled.

The captured 92 of the parliament's 237 seats, decisively beating the Islamic Democratic Alliance, its nearest competitor and the relic of Zia, who died in a plane crash three months before the vote. The Alliance won only 55 seats. A surge of ethnic support thrust the fledgling Mohajir Qaumi Movement into the third and pivotal position with 13 seats.

Under Pakistan's complex electoral system, more seats have yet to be decided, so a Bhutto government remains in doubt. By week's end, odds were perhaps 50-50. But the results are an unmistakable personal victory, whether she becomes Prime Minister or opposition leader. "The People's Party has emerged as the single largest party," she declared. "The acting President should now call on the People's Party to form a government."

Acting President Ghulam Ishaq Khan is not bound to invite Bhutto to form a government. But it is hard to imagine his sidestepping her without unleashing a furious reaction. Bhutto handily won all three National Assembly seats she contested (two of which will have to be filled in by-elections), and her party was carried to victory mainly on the strength of her blazing speeches and dazzling charisma. Standing in a convoy of speeding jeeps, her head held high and covered with a colorful dupatta, or scarf, this 35-year-old Western- educated wife and mother attracted frenzied adulation. To deny her the right to govern could just as easily turn those adoring crowds into mutinous mobs.

The President could still give the Alliance first crack at fashioning a governing coalition, but its two main leaders failed to win Assembly seats. Command of the Alliance was ceded to Mian Nawaz Sharif, chief minister of Punjab and a Zia protege, who won two seats.

Ishaq Khan hinted he would not automatically bypass Bhutto: "I think a woman Prime Minister might be a good change." In the male-dominated Muslim society of Pakistan, it would be an astonishing one. That did not daunt Bhutto. She immediately set out to solicit coalition partners. By Thursday night she claimed, "We already have a simple majority in the parliament." But Nawaz Sharif is also scrambling to assemble a majority, and likewise predicts he will succeed.