Pakistan The Undoing of Benazir

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Benazir Bhutto was one of the best political stories of the 1980s. Educated at Harvard and Oxford, she rallied from imprisonment and exile to return to Pakistan in 1986 and confront General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, the country's military ruler and the man who executed her father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. When Zia's death in a mysterious plane crash in 1988 opened the way for Pakistan's first regular elections in a decade, Bhutto, only 35 and the mother of a two-month-old son, led her father's Pakistan People's Party through a raucous campaign to victory -- an unprecedented achievement for a woman in an Islamic country.

All that striving turns out to have been the easy part. The Prime Minister, whose dramatic past and striking presence beguile Western admirers, is getting few favorable reviews in Pakistan. Her government has passed no legislation except a budget during its 14 months in power. Much of its energy has been squandered feuding with the opposition. Worse yet, her Cabinet stinks with corruption scandals, including allegations that her husband Asif Ali Zardari and father-in-law Hakim Ali Zardari, chairman of the parliamentary public- accounts committee, have taken advantage of their position to collect kickbacks on government contracts. Says Maleeha Lodi, a journalist close to Bhutto: "This government has lost the moral high ground. She is at grave risk politically."

While Bhutto still adheres to the liberal democratic ideals that many Pakistanis found so attractive in the 1988 election, her judgment has often been carried away by the vengeful currents of Pakistani politics, especially the fury of those in her People's Party who were cruelly oppressed under Zia. Among the party's first acts after coming to power was a campaign to bribe and threaten legislators in Punjab, an opposition-ruled province where more than 60% of Pakistanis live. The goal: to overthrow Bhutto's nemesis, Mian Nawaz Sharif, Punjab's chief minister, a wealthy industrialist and a crony of Zia's. Privately, Bhutto's confidants justified the failed assault by arguing that Nawaz Sharif won only by rigging Punjab's elections, a view not supported by most impartial observers.

The opposition Islamic Democratic Alliance has proved to be no more scrupulous, striking back with a bribery operation against a People's Party provincial government and leveling wild charges against Bhutto. Example: by emphasizing better relations with New Delhi, she was "selling out" to India. Opposition politicians have not been above a catty whispering campaign, asking how a mother with her second child due any day can possibly be a suitable Prime Minister. Nawaz Sharif has done more than talk. He used his police to arrest and lodge questionable cases against People's Party politicians in Punjab. Bhutto's government countered by using tax audits, cutting off state financing and exercising other federal powers to paralyze the industrial empire of Nawaz Sharif's family as well as the business interests of other I.D.A. backers. The bickering culminated in a no-confidence motion in parliament in November that Bhutto narrowly survived. Both parties offered as much as $1 million to any member who would switch sides, and resorted to guarding their erstwhile backers against temptation by placing them under police "protection."