The Bhutto legacy

Re “After Bhutto,” editorial, Jan. 2

The Times editorial urges free and fair elections in Pakistan. How soon we forget. Democratic elections do not guarantee a peaceful nation. There appear to be nations that are only held together by a dictatorial strongman or which choose leaders bent on aggression against their neighbors. We removed Saddam Hussein, sponsored free and fair elections and produced a nation torn apart by sectarian conflict and a government in paralysis. Free and fair elections in the Palestinian territories brought a terrorist organization to power. Free and fair elections in Germany brought Adolf Hitler to power. I predict that free and fair elections in Pakistan will produce another Iraq.

All this said sadly by a devoted lover of democracy who has learned from history that realism trumps idealism.

Alan Pollack

Woodland Hills

Neither Benazir Bhutto’s notoriously corrupt husband, Asif Ali Zardari, nor her naive 19-year-old son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, has the legitimacy to run a nation of 165 million people. I am a Pakistan People’s Party sympathizer and have always wished that leaders within the party be elected democratically. A new star has appeared on the horizon: the Western-educated and moderate Aitzaz Ahsan. Ahsan, a barrister and a party leader, has single-handedly led a nearly yearlong lawyers movement successfully.

Honest, credible and articulate, Ahsan has displayed enormous integrity, courage and fortitude to withstand all the tests that he has been so cruelly made to go through. He is still incarcerated without a trial because [President Pervez] Musharraf feels more threatened by him than the entire opposition combined.

The Times is right, Pakistan and the world would be better served by a change in PPP leadership. Washington at this juncture would be wiser to switch its support to the moderate and largely pro-Western civil society in Pakistan. The post-Bhutto picture does not have to be bleak if the military in Pakistan is replaced by the enlightened civil society led by the lawyers and the judiciary.

Behal Must

Surrey, Canada

American foreign policy is to see Pakistan move toward democracy. Congress, the media, the State Department and the Bush administration supported Bhutto, who appointed herself as a lifetime chairwoman of the political party she inherited from her father. Upon her death, she passed the baton to her 19-year-old son, who is barely out of high school, to lead a country that is in the frontline in the war against terrorism.

How can a person with feudal values and practices and acting like a monarch have served American foreign policy objectives of democracy? Did someone in the U.S. government think of scenarios if Bhutto were assassinated? What should the world expect from her son as a partner with the world’s most powerful nation to defeat the world’s most notorious gang of mass murderers, Al Qaeda? Is it time to reform Washington lobbying by stopping foreign nations from misusing our political and media freedom to advance their personal corrupt objectives?

Faruk Zia

Fountain Valley