You can't have democracy with this many drugs

Pakistan's new military strongman General Pervez Musharraf has promised to purge the state of corruption before restoring democracy. Seasoned Pakistan-watchers will recall that when that earlier cartoon of a dictator - General Zia ul-Haq, of the waxed moustache and raccoon eyes - was in his heyday he, too, used to speak of cleaning up the country and then holding elections.

In fact, he promised and then cancelled elections so often that the promises literally became a bad joke. His title in those bad old days was CMLA, which officially stood for "Chief Martial Law Administrator", but which really, people began to say, stood for "Cancel My Last Announcement". Perhaps fearing such a reaction, Musharraf has - four weeks after his bloodless coup - still preferred not to announce elections at all. This is hardly an improvement.

Let us for a moment ignore the obvious fact that Musharraf's refusal to give a timetable for restoring democracy is in itself a corrupt act, his second such misdeed, the coup he engineered being the first. Instead, let's take a look at the condition of the stables he has undertaken to clean up.

The Nawaz Sharif government was economically incompetent, unpleasantly autocratic, deeply unpopular and widely suspected of many forms of corruption, including election-rigging. Its actions merit the most thorough investigation. But how can Musharraf, who has already accused Nawaz Sharif of trying to murder him and has called that alleged attempt "treasonable", persuade us that his regime's inquiries will be dispassionate and credible? A generation ago, Zia executed Prime Minister Z A Bhutto after a judicially absurd show trial. The echoes of that case can already be heard in Musharraf's pronouncements on Nawaz, and they are getting louder.

Benazir Bhutto, her People's Party and her husband Asif Zardari also have a lot of questions to answer. They, too, stand accused of large-scale corruption, and Zardari of being involved in the murder of Benazir's own brother as well. When Nawaz Sharif was prime minister, Benazir could and frequently did dismiss such charges as part of Sharif's political vendetta against her. Not very surprisingly, she has rushed to welcome the Musharraf coup. How will Musharraf convince us that justice will be done in the Bhutto/Zardari case as well?

Look beyond the political parties and you see the real roots of the social wreckage of Pakistan. The poppy fields of the North-West Frontier have been producing opium for as long as anyone can remember. Nowadays they produce great quantities of heroin as well. For that heroin to be exported it must travel a thousand miles south to the port of Karachi - past army units and octroi inspection points.

In other words - and this is the opinion of every Pakistani and expert commentator I know - the Pakistani drug industry simply could not operate without the active co-operation of the bureaucracy and the army. If Musharraf would have us believe in his anti-corruption platform, he must first demonstrate that the army has cleaned up its own act. How exactly does he propose to do that?

And what does he intend to do about Karachi, which is at present a terrifyingly wild and all-but-lawless burg, in the grip not only of violent sectarian politics but also of the drug overlords and criminal mafias? Karachi's citizens speak every day of the collaboration between the city's police force and organised crime. What is Musharraf's plan for the redemption of his country's most important city?

Beneath this suppurating surface lie deeper ills that a military regime is even less able to address. Pakistan is a country in which democratic institutions - or even democratic instincts - have never been permitted to take root. Instead, the country's elites - military, political, industrial, aristocratic, feudal - take it in turns to loot the nation's wealth, while increasingly extremist mullahs demand the imposition of draconian versions of Sharia law.

Nawaz Sharif's government, as it grew weaker, grew ever more fanatically Islamist. Musharraf's quickly expressed determination not to permit fundamentalists to take over the state should be welcomed. But can the leader of any army coup hope to create the kind of secular, democratic state in which army coups become not only unnecessary, but unthinkable?

Can any elitist - and a man who believes he has the right to seize control of an entire nation-state is certainly that - be believed when he announces his desire to fight against elitism?

Musharraf has also made placatory noises toward India and withdrawn some troops from the frontier. Yet he is also the man responsible for planning this year's catastrophic military adventure in Kashmir, and he has made many ultra-hawkish comments about India in the recent past. Why should we trust his new, softer line when he has shown every sign of having an itchy trigger finger - a finger that now sits upon Pakistan's nuclear button?

The Musharraf coup is, at present, very popular in Pakistan. So were the Pakistani nuclear tests. There are reports that after those tests ordinary Pakistanis went out to the blast sites and gathered up jars of radioactive earth as patriotic souvenirs.

Those jars, sitting in pride of place in Pakistani homes, may prove to be less worth having than they now seem. You could make much the same sort of hypothesis about the Musharraf regime.