Bhutto’s defeat clouds the already uncertain Pakistan-U.S. relationship. Under Ronald Reagan, Congress and the White House brushed aside concerns over Pakistan’s human-rights record and its nuclear weapons program. Its logistical support for the Afghan rebels took priority. In the years following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan received more than $4 billion in U.S. military and economic aid. After the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan, criticism of the Islamabad government renewed. Congress recently suspended all new aid to Pakistan because the Bush administration could no longer certify that Pakistan was not building a nuclear bomb. In fact, U.S. officials believe Pakistan has at least five “nuclear explosive devices” ready to be assembled. Bhutto, a graduate of Radcliffe and Oxford, might have won Pakistan a sympathetic hearing in Washington. But her opponents turned her U.S. ties into an argument against her, claiming that she had sold out to the West.
Bhutto blamed “massive” vote fraud for her unexpectedly bad showing-she picked up only 45 seats to 105 for the victorious Islamic Democratic Alliance led by businessman Nawaz Sharif. Going into the final weeks, the disaffected voters seemed evenly divided. The Army’s powerful Inter services Intelligence Directorate, in a classified Oct. 10 report, forecast that Bhutto’s party would win 72 seats-still far short of a majority-according to sources close to the military. On Friday a delegation of international poll watchers, organized by the Washington, D.C.-based National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), said that irregularities hadn’t “significantly altered” the nationwide results. But the poll watchers reported “serious problems” that may have widened the Islamic Democratic Alliance’s margin by 20 to 30 seats.
After interim Prime Minister Ghulam Jatoi, a key member of the rightist coalition, cast his vote, 10 men armed with AK-47s appeared at the polling station, followed by 10 more who began to stamp hundreds of fraudulent ballots on Jatoi’s behalf, a poll watcher for Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Alliance told NEWSWEEK. “They told me to keep quiet, or they would break my legs,” said Niaz Ahmed Chandio, 25. Jatoi won the district by 67,000 votes. Independent analysts also cited odd patterns of voter turnout. The nationwide participation rate, 45 percent, was 2 points higher than in 1988. But in about 25 constituencies, nearly all in the closely contested region of Punjab, the turnout was strikingly lower. Bhutto won almost all 25 seats in 1988; this time her foes swept them.
Dirty tricks? Still, dirty tricks alone could not account for Bhutto’s defeat. Disenchantment with her inability to deliver basic services set in almost as soon as she took office; her failure to shake up her party’s feudal machinery alienated the growing middle class and bred cynicism about the democratic process itself. Meanwhile, the Islamic Democratic Alliance, with the full weight of the military behind it, had shown growing popularity, winning 14 of 20 parliamentary by-elections since 1988. As the election approached this year, the Alliance’s well-connected candidates used the interim government’s money to build roads and wells in poor neighborhoods.
Perhaps mindful of her father’s fate, Bhutto prudently did not match her charges of fraud with a call for popular resistance to the results. She could yet rise again. For his part, Sharif, 40, a steel magnate and crony of top military leaders, claimed vindication for the forces that have long opposed the Bhutto family. “It is very painful to see what has happened in this country,” Sharif told NEWSWEEK. People really have lost confidence in politicians. Our primary objective will be to show the people we are a clean, good and honest government."
Even if he can do that. Sharif won’t find it easy to mend fences with the United States. Though Pakistan sent 5,000 troops to help U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, the standoff with Iraq, which is also building nuclear weapons, has only underscored Washington’s fears about the spread of unconventional weapons. In response to U.S. pressure, Bhutto had taken some steps to slow her country’s bomb-building program, U.S. officials say. But it revived in the final months of her tenure, with her knowledge. Earlier this month interim Prime Minister Jatoi flatly refused a U.S. request for on site inspection of its atomic plants. The development of a Pakistani bomb, it seems, was the one thing Benazir Bhutto and her enemies could agree on.
