A grieved brother of
Miss Bhutto Shaheed

The same thing seems to apply to MQM, with Altaf Bhai looking like a crooked mafia don to me… but with the middle order tiers of the leadership seeming quite intelligent and trustworthy.

It seems that these parties, which have a middle order made up of intellectuals, require a charismatic leader to carry the party…. but why does there exist this relationship between charisma and corruption among Pakistani leaders?

(MMA and PML are made up of jokers right the way through.)

A political scientist friend of mine remarked that Bush himself could have given the exact same speech, and indeed one can imagine Bush taking a similar line as part of a project to coerce Musharraf to hold elections at some point in future. One cannot be especially optimistic about the prospects of global democracy installed by US/World Bank/IMF-wielded carrots and sticks.

While unapologetic Cold War era US support of dictatorships (or mujahidin groups) is abhorrent on one level, at least it is not quite the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing we are seeing paraded before us now in the name of democracy. There is not far to go before ‘democracy’ appears to most of the world as a baldly-obvious code word for letting shark capitalism run rampant in the poorer nations of the world. Will a return of Benazir to Pak politics mean anything different from this, especially if it comes along with a Bush-Musharraf brokered democratization of the country? Can one expect the compulsions of the electorate to dictate any kind of significant return to populist rhetoric and action?