The province of Sindh in southern Pakistan is a
rural region of dusty mudbrick villages, of
white-domed blue-tiled Sufi shrines, and of salty
desert scrublands broken, quite suddenly, by
floodplains of wonderful fecundity. These thin,
fertile belts of green-cotton fields, rice
paddies, cane breaks, and miles of checkerboard
mango orchards-snake along the banks of the Indus
River as it meanders its sluggish, silted,
café-au-lait way through the plains of Pakistan
down to the shores of the Arabian Sea.

In many ways the landscape here with its harsh
juxtaposition of dry horizons of sand and narrow
strips of intensely fertile cultivation more
closely resembles upper Egypt than the
well-irrigated Punjab to its north. But it is
poorer than either-in fact, it is one of the most
backward areas in all of Asia. Whatever index of
development you choose to dwell on-literacy,
health care provision, daily income, or numbers
living below the poverty line-rural Sindh comes
bumping along close to the bottom. Here landlords
still rule with guns and private armies over vast
tracts of country; bonded labor-a form of debt
slavery-leaves tens of thousands shackled to
their places of work. It is also, in parts,
lawless and dangerous to move around in,
especially at night.

I first learned about the dacoits-or
highwaymen-when I attempted to leave the
provincial market town of Sukkur after dark a
week before the recent elections. [1] It was a
tense time everywhere, and violence was widely
expected. But in Sindh the tension had resolved
itself into an outbreak of rural brigandage. We
left Sukkur asking for directions to Larkana, the
home village of the Bhutto family, only to be
warned by people huddled in tea stalls shrouded
under thick shawls that we should not try to
continue until first light the following morning.
They said there had been ten or fifteen robberies
on the road in the last fortnight alone.

If it is dangerous to travel here at night, it is
much more dangerous to declare openly for the
candidates you support in the elections. The big
landlords here-the zamindars-expect electoral
loyalty from their tenants. As the Pakistani
writer Ahmed Rashid put it, "In some
constituencies if the feudals put up their dog as
a candidate, that dog would get elected with
ninety-nine per cent of the vote." Such loyalty
can be enforced. In the more remote and lawless
areas the zamindars and their thugs often bribe
or threaten the polling agents, then simply stuff
the ballot boxes with thousands of votes for
themselves. This is sufficiently common for the
practice to have its own descriptive term: "booth
capturing."

Democracy has never thrived in Pakistan in part
because landowning has traditionally been the
social base from which most politicians emerge,
especially in rural areas. Here Pakistan is quite
different from India, where the urban middle
class quickly gained control in 1947. That class
has been largely excluded from Pakistan’s
political process, as, even more so, has the
rural peasantry. There are no Pakistani
equivalents of Indian peasant leaders such as
Laloo Prasad Yadav, the village cowherd turned
(former) chief minister of Bihar, or Mayawati,
the dalit (untouchable) leader and current chief
minister of Uttar Pradesh.

You can see the results of a system dominated by
landowners in a town like Khairpur, a short
distance from Sukkur in the northern part of
Sindh. As you drive along, the turban-clad head
of the local feudal lord, Sadruddin Shah, with a
curling black mustache, sneers down from
billboards placed every fifty yards along the
road. Shah, who was standing, as usual, for no
less than three different seats, is often held up
in the liberal Pakistani press as the epitome of
all that is worst about Pakistani electoral
feudalism. After all, this is a man who goes
electioneering not with leaflets setting out his
program, but with five pickup trucks full of his
men armed with pump-action shotguns and
Kalashnikovs.

For generations the area has been dominated by
Sadruddin’s family, the head of whom-currently
Sadruddin’s father-is known as the Pir Pagara,
“the Holy Man with the Turban.” The Pir Pagaras
are not only the largest and most powerful of the
local feudal landowners, but they are also the
descendants of the local Sufi saint. Normally
Sufism is a force for peace and brotherhood-Islam
at its most pluralistic and tolerant. At the
other end of Sindh I have attended the annual
’urs-or shrine festival-of the Sufi saint Shah
Abdul Latif, where there is ecstatic Sufi music,
the singing of love poetry, and men and women
dancing together-something that would horrify the
orthodox ’ulema.

But Khairpur has a very different and more
militant Sufi tradition. The Pir Pagaras have
always had their own Hur militia, which once
acted as a guerrilla force against the British
and now acts as Sadruddin’s private electoral
army. The week I was in the district the local
papers were full of stories of Sadruddin’s gunmen
shooting at crowds of little boys shouting
slogans supporting the recently assassinated
Benazir Bhutto, and burning down the houses of
those of his tenants who had flown opposition
flags.

The leaders of this feudal army were standing for
election under the banner of their own
pro-Musharraf faction of the Pakistan Muslim
League (known as PML-F, in the alphabet soup of
acronyms that characterizes Pakistani elections).
Against them were ranged the forces of Benazir
Bhutto’s party, the Pakistan People’s Party
(PPP). Contrary to its socialist-sounding name,
the PPP has traditionally also been very much a
feudal party that has consistently failed to
bring about any serious land reform that would
break the power of the landowners. Benazir Bhutto
herself was from a landowning feudal family in
Sindh; so is Asif Ali Zardari, her widower and
the current co-chairman of the PPP, which she
left to him and their son Bilawal in her will as
if it were a personal possession; so also is
Makhdoom Amin Fahim, the most likely candidate
for prime minister of the new PPP-dominated
coalition.

But things are at last beginning to change in
Pakistani politics, and here in Khairpur at
least, the PPP candidates were largely
middle-class-a new development in the region.
Nafisa Shah, who was one of the candidates
standing against Sadruddin, is the impeccably
middle-class daughter of a local lawyer, who is
currently at Oxford University writing a Ph.D.
dissertation on honor killings.

Nafisa’s campaign was hugely assisted by a wave
of sympathy for Benazir: the day she was
assassinated, Khairpur was consumed by riots, and
for four days full-scale warfare broke out
between Benazir supporters and the local
administration, during which the election
headquarters of the pro-Musharraf parties and
several offices of the local government were
burned down.

Partly because of this simmering discontent,
outbreaks of violence were predicted on polling
day, and everyone was anticipating widespread
rigging by Musharraf and his intelligence agency
cronies, something to which the
Musharraf-appointed election commission was
expected to turn a blind eye. This, it was
predicted, would be followed by more riots
organized by the discontented opposition parties
who had been cheated of their votes.

In fact, however, serious violence did not
materialize, either in Khairpur or elsewhere, and
to general astonishment, Nafisa and her fellow
PPP candidates had a remarkably strong victory,
monitored and filmed by Pakistan’s increasingly
fearless and independent press and television.
The PML-F was almost wiped out and Sadruddin Shah
won only his own home seat-and that with the
narrowest of margins.

What happened in Khairpur was a small
revolution-a middle-class victory over the forces
of reactionary feudal landlordism. More
astonishingly, it was a revolution that was
reproduced across the country. To widespread
surprise, the elections in Pakistan were free and
fair; and Pakistanis voted heavily in favor of
liberal centrist parties opposed to both the
mullahs and the army. Here, in a country normally
held up in the more Islamophobic right-wing press
of Western countries as the epitome of "what went
wrong" in the Islamic world, a popular election
resulted in an unequivocal vote for moderate,
secular democracy.

For Pakistani liberals, 2007 was one of the worst
years in their country’s history. In early March,
Musharraf suspended Pakistan’s chief justice,
Iftikhar Chaudhry, accusing him of using his
position for personal gain. This was clearly not
the case. Chaudhry had a reputation for both
integrity and independence, and most assumed that
Musharraf simply wanted to replace him with a
more pliant judge who would not block his
reelection as president.

Some were encouraged by the popular protests
mounted by Pakistan’s lawyers in response to
Chaudhry’s suspension-in city after city across
the country lawyers took to the streets in their
court robes, marching in orderly ranks, three
abreast, like emperor penguins in a nature film.
But any optimism was quickly dimmed by the
heavy-handed response of Musharraf’s riot police
and the simultaneous growth of Islamist
radicalism in the heart of the capital, Islamabad.

This took the form of the heavily veiled,
black-clad “chicks with sticks” who, in April
2007, emerged in large numbers armed with bamboo
canes from a mosque and madrasa complex in the
city center, not far from the headquarters of
Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The young
women then proceeded to ransack suspected
brothels and smash video and music stores in the
capital while the police watched, apparently
helpless. The bloody storming by the army of
their base, the Red Mosque, in early July was
followed by an unprecedented wave of suicide
bombings and Islamist revenge attacks against the
army. In all there were sixty suicide bombings in
Pakistan last year, leaving 770 people dead and
nearly 1,600 injured.

By autumn the situation had become even worse,
with a series of crushing military defeats
inflicted on the Pakistani army by the Taliban
in Waziristan, the “extraordinary rendition” by
Musharraf’s officials of the former prime
minister and opposition leader Nawaz Sharif back
to Saudi Arabia after his return from exile, and
the subsequent declaration of an emergency by
President Musharraf, who put a number of
dissenting lawyers, political opponents, and
human rights activists under house arrest. The
disasters reached a horrific climax in December
with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. This
led many to predict that Pakistan was looking
like a failed state stumbling toward collapse and
civil war. The cruel contrast with India, then
widely being celebrated as a future democratic
superpower on its sixtieth birthday, was
unmistakable.

Yet the widespread publicity given to the crisis
obscured the important changes that had quietly
taken place in Pakistani society during
Musharraf’s eight years in power. Pakistan’s
economy is currently in difficulty, with
fast-rising inflation and shortages of
electricity and flour; but between 2002 and 2006
it had grown almost as strongly as India’s. Until
the beginning of 2007, Pakistan had a
construction and consumer boom, with growth
approaching 8 percent; for several years its
stock market was the fastest-rising in Asia.

As you travel around Pakistan today you can see
the effects of the boom everywhere: in vast new
shopping malls and smart roadside filling
stations, in the cranes of the building sites and
the smokestacks of factories, in the expensive
new cars jamming the roads and in the ubiquitous
cell-phone stores. In 2003 the country had fewer
than three million cell phones; today apparently
there are 50 million, while car ownership has
been increasing at roughly 40 percent a year
since 2001. At the same time foreign direct
investment has risen from $322 million in 2002 to
$3.5 billion in 2006.

Pakistan’s cities, in particular, are fast
changing beyond recognition. As in India, there
is a burgeoning Pakistani fashion scene full of
ambitious gay designers and amazingly beautiful
models. There are also remarkable developments in
publishing. In nonfiction, Ahmed Rashid’s book
Taliban became the essential primer on
Afghanistan after 2001. Ayesha Siddiqa’s Military
Inc. and Zahid Hussain’s Frontline Pakistan are
two of the most penetrating recent studies of the
country and essential for understanding the
politics of Pakistan. Siddiqa is especially good
on the economic and political power of the army,
while Hussain’s book is the best existing guide
to Pakistan’s jihadis. There have also been
particularly impressive new works of fiction by
Pakistani writers, among them Kamila Shamsie’s
Kartography and Broken Verses, Nadeem Aslam’s
Maps for Lost Lovers, and Moni Mohsin’s End of
Innocence. One of Daniyal Mueenuddin’s short
stories, his wonderfully witty "Nawabdin
Electrician," was published in The New Yorker of
August 27, 2007.

Recently Mohsin Hamid, author of the best-seller
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, [2] wrote about this
change in culture. Having lived as a banker in
New York and London, he returned home to Lahore
to find the country unrecognizable. He was
particularly struck by

the incredible new world of media that had
sprung up..., a world of music videos, fashion
programmes, independent news networks,
cross-dressing talk-show hosts, religious
debates, stock-market analysis.... Not just
television, but also private radio stations and
newspapers have flourished.... The result is an
unprecedented openness.... Young people are
speaking and dressing differently.... The Vagina
Monologues was recently performed on stage in
Pakistan to standing ovations. [3]

Such reports are rare in the Western press, which
prefers its stereotypes simple: India, successful
and forward-looking; Pakistan, a typical Islamic
failure. The reality is of course much less
clear, and far more complex.

It was this newly enriched and empowered urban
middle class that showed its political muscle for
the first time with the organization of a
lawyers’ movement, whose protests against the
dismissal of the chief justice soon swelled into
a full-scale pro-democracy campaign, despite
Musharraf’s harassment and arrest of many
lawyers. The movement represented a huge shift in
Pakistani civil society’s participation in
politics. The middle class were at last moving
from their living rooms onto the streets, from
dinner parties into political parties.

February’s elections dramatically confirmed this
shift. The biggest electoral surprise of all was
the success of Nawaz Sharif’s conservative
faction of the Muslim League, the PML-N. This is
a solidly urban party, popular among exactly the
sort of middle-class voters in the Punjab who
have benefited most from the economic success of
the last decade, and who have since found that
status threatened by the recent economic slowdown
and the sudden steep rises in the prices of food,
fuel, and electricity.

The same is true of the success of the MQM, the
Karachi-based party representing the Mohajirs,
the emigrants who left India to come to Pakistan
at the founding of the country in 1947. Like
Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N, it is an urban-based
regional party attractive to middle-class voters.
Almost 50 percent of Pakistan’s population now
lives in urban areas, and the center of gravity
is shifting from the countryside to the large
cities. The parties that appealed most
successfully to this new demographic trend won
the most convincing victories in the polls.

The rise of the middle class was most clear in
the number of winning candidates who, for the
first time, came from such a background. In Jhang
district of the rural Punjab, for example, as
many as ten out of eleven of those elected are
the sons of revenue officers, senior policemen,
functionaries in the civil bureaucracy, and so
on, rather than usual feudal zamindars. This
would have been unthinkable ten years ago.

Even the most benign feudal lords suffered
astonishing electoral reverses. Mian Najibuddin
Owaisi was not just the popular feudal lord of
the village of Khanqah Sharif in the southern
Punjab, he was also the sajjada nasheen, the
descendant of the local Sufi saint, and so, like
Sadruddin Shah, regarded as something of a holy
man as well as the local landowner. But recently
Najibuddin made the ill-timed switch from
supporting Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N to the
pro-Musharraf Q-League. When I talked to people
in the village bazaar, they all said that they
did not like Musharraf, but they would still vote
for their landlord.

“Prices are rising,” said Hajji Sadiq, a cloth
merchant, sitting amid bolts of textiles. "There
is less and less electricity and gas."

“And what was done to Benazir was quite wrong,” his friend Salman agreed.

“But Najib sahib is our protector,” said Hajji.
"Whatever party he chooses, we will vote for him.
Even the Q-League.“”Why?" I asked.

"Because with him in power we have someone we can
call if we are in trouble with the police, or
need someone to speak to the administration.“”When we really need him he looks after us.“”We vote according to local issues only. Who cares about parties?"

Because of Najibuddin’s personal popularity, his
vote stood up better than many other
pro-Musharraf feudal lords-and he polled 46,000
votes. But he still lost, to an independent
candidate from a nonfeudal middle-class
background named Amir Varan, who received 57,000
votes and ousted the Owaisi family from control
of the constituency for the first time since they
entered politics in the elections of 1975.

As well as a middle-class victory over a feudal
past, in the west of the country the election was
also an important vote for secularism over the
Islamist religious parties.

In the last election of October 2002, thanks
partly to their closeness to the ruling military
government, and partly to their sympathy with
al-Qaeda, the Islamist Muttehida Majlis Amal
(MMA) alliance nearly tripled its representation
in the national assembly from 4 to 11.6 percent,
and swept the polls in the two key provinces
bordering Afghanistan-Baluchistan and the
North-West Frontier Province-where they went on
to form Islamist provincial governments.

This time, however, religious parties sunk from
fifty-six out of 272 seats in the national
assembly to just five. In the North-West Frontier
Province, the MMA has been comprehensively
defeated by the overtly secular Awami National
Party (ANP). This is a remnant of what was once a
mighty force: the nonviolent and secular Red
Shirts movement, which, before the creation of
Pakistan, was originally led by Khan Abdul
Ghaffar Khan, an important ally of Mahatma Gandhi
from the North-West Frontier Province. Ghaffar
Khan was locked up by one Pakistani general after
another for much of the time between Partition
and his death in 1988, but his political movement
has survived both the generals and a succession
of bomb blasts aimed at its party, and has
now-after nearly fifty years in opposition-made a
dramatic comeback under the leadership of Ghaffar
Khan’s grandson, Asfandyar Wali Khan.

“Before the Taliban,” the North-West Frontier
Province “used to be a very liberal area,” he
told me in Islamabad.

No one can force us to give up that
culture-even the suicide bombers. There is a very
clear polarization taking place...on one side
those striving for peace, nonviolence, and a
future of cooperation with the international
community, and on the other those who stand for
confrontation and hatred. They are men of
violence, but we refuse to be cowed. We may lose,
but we will make a stand.

In the election, Asfandyar’s ANP routed the
Islamists, demonstrating that contrary to their
image as bearded bastions of Islamist orthodoxy,
Pashtun tribesmen are as wary as anyone else of
violence, extremism, and instability. Now the ANP
is talking of extending the Pakistani political
parties into the troubled northern tribal areas
that are federally administered and act as the
buffer zone between Pakistan and Afghanistan: "If
I am prepared to take on the Maulvis in the
tribal areas, why should the government stop me?“asked Asfandyar. ”At the moment the tribal areas
are just left to fester. We have to end that
isolation and bring them forward."

The issues that mattered to voters in the
frontier were those of incompetent governance by
the MMA, increased insecurity, and especially the
fear of constant suicide bombings. Like
democratically elected parties anywhere else in
the world, the electorate judged the MMA on its
record, and threw it out for failing to deliver.
There is a clear lesson for US policymakers here.
The parties of political Islam are like any other
democratic parties: they will succeed or fail on
what they deliver. The best way of dealing with
democratic Islamists, if Pakistan’s experience is
anything to go by, is to let them be voted into
power and then reveal their own
incompetence-mullah-fatigue will no doubt quickly
set in. Besieging Islamist parties that have come
to power through a democratic vote, as the US has
done with Hamas, or allowing local proxies to rig
the vote so as to deprive them of power, as
happened in Egypt, only strengthens their hand
and increases their popularity.

There is an additional reason for modest optimism
about Pakistan’s future at the moment. In recent
years, the biggest threat to the country’s
stability has come from the jihadi groups created
and nourished by the army and the ISI for
selective deployment in Afghanistan and Kashmir,
but which soon followed their own violent agendas
within Pakistan itself. For the last decade, that
threat has been exacerbated by the ambiguous
attitude toward the jihadis maintained by the
Pakistani army and its intelligence services.
Some elements have been alarmed by the militants’
violence and the effects that supporting these
groups would have on the alliance with the US.
Others saw them as useful irregulars that could
still be drawn on to fight low-cost proxy wars
for the army. That era of division and ambiguity
now seems to be coming to a close.

On November 24, 2007, a suicide bomber detonated
himself beside a bus at the entrance of Camp
Hamza, the ISI’s Islamabad headquarters. Around
twenty people died in what is the first known
attack by an Islamist cell against the Pakistani
intelligence services. Many of the dead were ISI
staffers. This event, coming as it did after
three assassination attempts on General
Musharraf, several other bomb attacks on army
barracks, and the murder of many captured army
personnel in Waziristan, is credited with
persuading even the most stubbornly pro-Islamist
elements in the Pakistani army that the monster
they have created now has to be dispatched, and
as quickly as possible.

Shuja Nawaz is a Washington-based specialist on
the Pakistani army who comes from a prominent and
well-connected military family and who is about
to publish Crossed Swords, an important new book
on the army. [4] According to Nawaz,

The direct attacks on the army have shaken up
the military at all levels. One of Musharraf’s
senior colleagues said he was changing his cars
daily to avoid being identified when he hits the
roads of Rawalpindi. The army brass has been told
not to go out in uniforms. Soon, they may stop
using their staff cars with flags and star plates.

This is obviously a radically new situation, and
one that changes all previous calculations on the
part of the military. The Pakistan expert Stephen
P. Cohen of the Brookings Institution agrees with
this assessment. He recently told me:

The senior leadership of the army under
Musharraf now regards the threat from Islamic
radicals as being far greater than the threat
posed by India. That conviction has been hugely
increased since the suicide bomb attacks on army
staff and the intelligence agencies this past
December. [5]

This week the news came that the army had rounded
up in Lahore an important cell of
Lashkar-i-Jhangvi Islamist militants; many more
such arrests are expected soon.

Over the last few years there has been something
of an existential crisis in Pakistan, at the
heart of which lay the question: What sort of
country did Pakistanis want? Did they want a
Western-style liberal democracy, as envisaged by
the poet Iqbal, who first dreamed up the idea of
Pakistan, and by the country’s eventual founder,
Muhammad Ali Jinnah? An Islamic republic like
Mullah Omar’s Afghanistan? Or a military-ruled
junta of the sort created by Generals Ayyub Khan,
Zia, and Musharraf, who, among them, have ruled
Pakistan for thirty-four of its sixty years of
existence?

Though turnout in the election was fairly low,
partly owing to fear of suicide bombings, it is
clear that Pakistanis have overwhelmingly
rejected the military and Islamist options and
chosen instead to back secular democracy. And if
many stayed at home, no fewer than 36 million
Pakistanis braved the threatened bombs to vote in
an election which by South Asian standards was
remarkably free of violence, corruption,
ballot-stuffing, or “booth capturing.”

A new coalition government now looks likely to
come to power peacefully, bringing together
Zadari’s People’s Party and Sharif’s Muslim
League, and will do so unopposed by the army.
These developments should now lead commentators
to reassess the country that many have long
written off and caricatured as a terror-breeding
swamp of Islamist iniquity.

The country I saw in February on a long road trip
from Lahore in the Punjab down through rural
Sindh to Karachi was not a failed state, or
anything even approaching "the most dangerous
country in the world...almost beyond repair" as
the London Spectator recently suggested, joined
in its view by The New York Times and The
Washington Post among many others. On the
contrary, the countryside I passed through was no
less peaceful and prosperous than that on the
other side of the Indian border; indeed its road
networks are far more developed. It was certainly
a far cry from the violent instability of
post-occupation Iraq or Afghanistan.

On my travels I found a surprisingly widespread
consensus that the mullahs should keep to their
mosques, and the increasingly unpopular military
should return to its barracks. The new army
chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, who took over when
Musharraf stepped down from his military role
last year, seems to recognize this. He has
repeatedly talked of pulling the army back from
civilian life, and ordering his soldiers to stay
out of politics. He has also ordered that no army
officer may meet with President Musharraf without
his personal approval. He also seems committed to
maintaining tight security to protect Pakistan’s
nuclear arsenal.

Pakistan will not change overnight. Much violence
and unrest no doubt lie ahead, as shown by the
recent assassination by a suicide bomber in
Rawal-pindi of General Mushtaq Baig, the head of
the Pakistan Army Medical Corps, and continuing
bomb blasts in the troubled Swat Valley, once the
country’s most popular tourist destination. The
country still has a vast problem with rural and
urban poverty, and a collapsing education system.
It also has serious unresolved questions about
its political future. As Ahmed Rashid said in a
recent interview:

The new coalition government will have to
face continuing behind the scenes efforts by
President Pervez Musharraf and the intelligence
agencies to undermine them even before they are
allowed to govern. Musharraf’s agents backed by a
section of the Washington establishment had been
secretly trying to persuade Zardari to go into
alliance with the former ruling party-the
Pakistan Muslim League-Q group. The Q group has
been decimated in the elections-23 ministers lost
their seats and today it is leaderless,
visionless and without an agenda-except it
remains a pawn in the hands of Musharraf. [6]

For many Pakistanis, there continues to be
confusion and disillusion. Most of the country’s
impoverished citizens still live precarious and
uncertain lives. A growing insurgency is spilling
out of the tribal areas on the Afghan border. But
Pakistan is not about to fall apart, or implode,
or break out into civil war, or become a Taliban
state with truckfuls of mullahs pouring down on
Islamabad from the Khyber Pass. It is not at all
clear whether the members of Pakistan’s flawed
and corrupt political elite have the ability to
govern the country and seize the democratic
opportunity offered by this election, rather than
simply use it as an opportunity for personal
enrichment. But they are unlikely ever again to
have such a good opportunity to redefine this
crucial strategic country as a stable and
moderate Islamic democracy that can work out its
own version of India’s remarkable economic and
political success.

Lahore, March 3, 2008