Pakistan needs more than elections. Only a new political class will do

Stephen Schwartz says that, in this failing state, the ballot box is also a tinderbox. Even if Monday’s election goes ahead, Pakistan might well end up in a worse state than before: exporting terror, spawning confrontation, at war with itself

The most important country in the world right now faces the most dangerous election in recent times. The country is Pakistan, not America, and the elections for parliament take place this coming Monday. Policy experts speak of ‘failed states’, and Pakistan is just about as close to failure as it is possible for a state to be. That’s one reason the world will be watching on Monday. Another and more immediate reason for interest is the assassination at the end of last year of Benazir Bhutto, twice the country’s prime minister and the secularist leader of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).

Bhutto’s death had been predicted as inevitable by many Pakistani and foreign observers once she returned last year from years of exile, but in a sense she was just one more victim of the failing state. There have been many others. In 2002, for example, the American journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in Karachi and decapitated by the al-Qa’eda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Pakistan is the worldwide centre of Islamic terrorism. Osama bin Laden himself is thought to be in hiding on the border with Afghanistan, and Pakistani extremists are operating in Afghanistan, Kashmir and India — and the UK and United States.

Pakistanis have made Britain the most formidable outpost for Islamist extremism in western Europe. The groundwork in the UK is mainly done by the Pakistani branch of the fundamentalist Deobandi sect — which produced the Taleban. This sect recruits jihadists, who are sent from London to Lahore for training, thence to carry out atrocities in Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and the UK.