Next Step : Bhutto Falls Short of Promise : Pakistan’s premier gets a second chance. But social strife, corruption and in-fighting are flourishing.

A year ago this week, a young, well-born Ivy Leaguer who had been the first woman elected to govern a Muslim country took to the airwaves to vow that this time she would not disappoint the Pakistani people.

“Dear countrymen! The dark clouds besetting our democratic horizon have disappeared and given way to a new dawn,” Benazir Bhutto declared. “By Allah’s grace and your prayers, I have become the prime minister to serve the country.”

It was Oct. 20, 1993, and an upset election victory and a craftily assembled parliamentary coalition had given Bhutto another chance at governing one of the Islamic world’s most powerful yet troubled states.

Bhutto’s first 20-month term, which ended in 1990 with her being removed for alleged incompetence and corruption, left many of her followers sadder but wiser.

But with a second chance, and victory in her country’s freest elections in history, she told the nation: “With my mind’s eye I envision a glorious future ahead of us.”

The glamorous daughter of the late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the rural landlord who became the most popular premier in Pakistani history, still had the undisputed gift to inspire, to make the poor dream of a more decent life.

Twelve months have now passed in Pakistan--”the Land of the Pure”--and for many the clouds again have been replaced by a haze of gloom.

In the year of her second chance, Bhutto, now 41 and said by some Pakistani newspapers to to be expecting her fourth child, has managed to stave off frantic efforts to oust her by the man she defeated last October, ex-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. But in striving to reach the lofty goals she set herself and her Pakistan People’s Party--”progress and prosperity” for all of Pakistan’s 120 million people--she has fallen short.

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Political gambits and in-fighting are eating up much of her government’s time, the economy is idling, corruption is endemic, and social strife has become so widespread that, in a nation created as an Islamic homeland, Shiites and Sunnis are murdering one other.

“If you look at recent history, Pakistan has had seven prime ministers in eight years,” Zaffar Abbas, Islamabad bureau chief for the Herald magazine, observed. “Completing one year in office with all the turmoil and everybody trying to bring down the government is an achievement in itself. Apart from that, it has been a disappointing story.”

Disillusion has been all the greater this time because Bhutto was able to install a close ally, Farooq Leghari, as president, and the once-hostile army has seemed to remain neutral under its current chief, Gen. Abdul Waheed.

Some analysts ask if Bhutto, the Harvard and Oxford grad who shouldered the populist mantle of her father following his execution in 1979, has concluded some sort of Faustian bargain. In exchange for political survival, they wonder, has she relinquished her oft-proclaimed goals: radical reform of society, protection of women’s rights and the fostering of a modern, prosperous nation united by a staunch but tolerant belief in Islam?

Not at all, asserts Bhutto.

“We are committed to an agenda for change,” she said in a recent speech.

“She has completely set aside her party’s ideals,” Abbas said in disagreement. “ ‘For the time being,’ her supporters say. But as of today, she has set them aside. She has done these things to guarantee her survival at the cost of ignoring the party ideals.”

Foreign economists and bankers applaud the tough, often unpopular measures she has undertaken to make Pakistan’s government live within its means and to privatize key sectors like energy and telecommunications.

Bhutto has cut the once-ballooning budget deficit from 8% to 5.8% of gross domestic product. Currency reserves have increased from a meager $200 million in June, 1993, to a staggering $3 billion.

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Her government has announced plans to sell off 49% of state-owned oil and gas enterprises within a year, and raised at least $860 million last month through privatization of the telephone company.

For the average Pakistani, who Bhutto’s father courted with Huey Long-like visions of “bread, a roof and clothing,” such numbers matter not at all, of course.

Disgruntled consumers and shopkeepers can cite other figures: a 20% price hike on wheat as of last April, or new sales taxes. Inflation, the Bhutto government’s No. 1 economic priority, is still averaging an official 11.5%, while economic growth last year was only 4% against a targeted 7.9%.

But Bhutto loyalists say the government’s strategy, including innovative policies designed to entice foreign investment to revitalize the laggard energy and petroleum sectors, make them bullish about the remainder of the prime minister’s five-year term.

“Yes, in the first nine months, you couldn’t see anything happening. All of these policies were being put into place,” said Saleem Zulfiqar Khan, an Islamabad corporate lawyer. “But in the last three to four weeks, there has been a change in public opinion, I think. People have seen that these policies, which were just words to them, are putting money on the table.”

This month, for instance, a Hong Kong tycoon announced the construction of a 5,280-megawatt coal-fired power plant worth $7.5 billion--the largest single investment in Pakistan’s history. In September, a U.S. business delegation led by Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary signed contracts worth nearly $4 billion.

Pakistanis who theorize that their country is about to take off economically because of the groundwork performed during Bhutto’s first 12 months in office believe that is the logic behind the invigorated campaign of protests and strikes that Nawaz Sharif began last month to oust her.

If the Pakistan Muslim League leader waited another three to four months, they theorize, the rebirth of prosperity would be so obvious that he would get little support.

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“By creating instability, he is trying to scare off foreign investment,” charged Khurshid Hasan Meer, a founding member of the People’s Party and former Pakistani health and labor minister. “He wants people injured, people dead, and he wants clashes. He’s gone berserk.”

Sharif, a balding 45-year-old Punjabi who once promised Bhutto his full cooperation, has exchanged damaging allegations of graft and corruption with her ministers. As tax authorities probe Sharif and his allies for alleged financial misdeeds and real estate scams while the industrialist was in power, Sharif has accused President Leghari of involvement in a land scandal and of hoarding cotton along with Bhutto’s husband, Asif Zardari, to make a killing on the market.

The political weather has grown so stormy that on Aug. 23, Sharif breached one of the few ground rules of Pakistan’s roughhouse politics by proclaiming that the country had nuclear bombs, as U.S. experts long believed. Sharif claimed that he acted to prevent Bhutto, whom he called a “security risk,” from rolling back the program.

It was a bizarre twist in the political career of the businessman turned politician plucked from obscurity by Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, the late military ruler who was the man who overthrew Bhutto’s father and had him hanged.

Bhutto, in the meantime, appears to have done much to mend her bridges with Zia’s successors. Defense expenditure still consumes 34.5% of the government budget, appeasing leaders of the 577,000-man military but making it hard to deliver on her party’s promises of better education, health and welfare programs.

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But Bhutto has failed over the last 12 months in her greatest challenge: to restore tranquillity to a land riven by a bewildering variety of conflicts. Since she began her second term, Muslim fundamentalists have increased their attacks on minorities, including Pakistani Christians and members of the Ahmadiya sect, and women. Hundreds of people have been thrown in jail for violating an anti-blasphemy law.

Revenge killings have mounted among rival Sunni and Shiite gangs. Tribal wars have broken out in the deserts of Baluchistan. Perhaps most worrisome for Bhutto is her native Sind. Karachi, the province’s seaside capital and the nation’s business and industrial hub, has been turned into a Dodge City by shootouts between Sindis and embittered Muslim transplants from India, the Mohajirs.

The Bhuttos’ own civil war also continues. Although Benazir’s feud with her mother, Nusrat, seems to have cooled since the days when her mother called her a “dictator,” her younger brother doesn’t flinch from impugning her competence or character. Murtaza Bhutto accuses his sister and her husband of accepting a $2-million campaign gift from a banker now jailed on fraud charges.

PPP stalwarts claim that Bhutto is delivering on her populist promises, and cite a 30% increase in the education budget and the recruitment of 30,000 women to care for rural children and expectant mothers.

Bhutto’s supporters say she needs more time. “No, the people aren’t 100% happy,” attorney Khan allowed. “So let’s say they’re less unhappy than they were.”

Biography

Name: Benazir Bhutto

Title: Prime minister of Pakistan

Age: 41

Personal: Born in Karachi, Pakistan. Daughter of former Pakistani leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was executed by a military regime in 1979. At age 16, came to the United States to attend Radcliffe College. Became first woman elected to govern a Muslim nation.

Quote: “We are committed to an agenda for change.”