Graphic: Violence in Pakistan

The burning barricades set up across Karachi today by Benazir Bhutto's supporters do not have to presage civil war. Pakistan has gone through a year of crisis, as eight years of military rule has unravelled, yet enough of the country's institutions work well to have provided a powerful steadying influence through the growing turmoil.

The military itself, the strongest organisation in the country, is the biggest insurance against widespread sectarian violence. The civil service, the judiciary (even though it has been drawn into politics since the spring), the provincial governments, have given Pakistan since its birth an astonishing self-righting capability during repeated crises. The health of the commercial sector — one of the most impressive products of President Musharraf's eight-year tenure — is a newer but powerful factor.

Of course, widespread civil unrest is possible — and the more likely if elections are postponed significantly. The best course for Pakistan now is to hold those polls, giving Benazir's grieving supporters a legitimate outlet for their fury. Her Pakistan People's Party (PPP) stands an excellent chance, if the vote goes ahead, of securing a majority.

The most serious immediate threat, however, may come from business and finance, if the capital that has poured into Pakistan in recent years begins to pour out. Beyond that, the greatest damage would come from any entrenchment of the position of the military.

Musharraf may have supplied stability, of a sort, but the encroachment of the army into every arena of public life, extending its own networks of preferment and corruption, was itself becoming the aggravation, not the solution. No doubt, the military has the ability to deliver peace on the streets in the very short term, but beyond, its primacy is a recipe for profound social unrest, as Musharraf's tenacity in clinging to power was beginning to show.

The PPP itself — as it tries to recover after the death of its charismatic leader, whose position was unchallenged even in eight years of exile — will have a central role in determining whether the current violence takes root and spreads. If it can produce a single leader to unite its many factions, then it may be able to direct its supporters to express their passion through rallies or votes, drawing on the network of local candidates it had already mustered to fight the elections. The most common name mentioned in the hours after Benazir's death as a possible leader was Makhdoom Ameen Fahim, the PPP vice-chairman who ran the party during her exile.

But the party — sometimes disparagingly called a cult, for the consuming devotion of its supporters to the Bhutto clan — may find it hard to convert that passion to a new leader. It was built by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir's father, out of the obsessive loyalty of many of the poorest people in the farmland of Sindh province, the slums of Karachi and the villages of Baluchistan and North West Frontier Province. That passion was transfered to Benazir after her father's execution.

At her homecoming in Karachi in October, the party's formidable machine managed to assemble hundreds of thousands to greet her. Outside Bilawal House, the family compound, hundreds of supporters who had travelled miles simply sat, day after day, at the foot of the 30ft security barrier, knowing they would not catch a glimpse of their leader but happy to be within yards of her presence.

If the PPP cannot pick a new leader, the danger is that its factions now start fighting. Urban intellectuals may rally to Aitzaz Ahsan, the omnipresent head of the Supreme Court of Pakistan Bar Association, who led lawyers' protests against Musharraf. But he has no political base; instead, others of the 700,000-strong Bhutto clan, many of whom loathed Benazir, may jostle for their share of support.

If that happens, it may become impossible to hold elections, even if the army has managed to keep the lid on violence. In that case, the frustrations of Benazir's supporters have the potential to keep erupting in violent protest.

The army is large enough (with more than half a million soldiers) and well-disciplined enough to control uprisings in the main cities, although it can do nothing — as her assassination has shown — against suicide bombers. This year, Pakistan has suffered 40-odd suicide attacks, killing more than 750 people, although most of the attacks have been near the Afghan border. The big cities, always vulnerable, have largely been spared.

A display of stability, even delivered as a state of emergency, will do a lot to reassure financial markets. It might deter expatriate Pakistanis working in the Gulf from withdrawing the cash they had so enthusiastically begun putting into their home country.

But the curse of Pakistan is that while the army can always claim to deliver security, it cannot deliver reform. One of Musharraf's worst mistakes, although ignored by Britain, the US and his other international supporters, was to allow the army to abuse its power to shore up the standing and personal wealth of key officers.

The heart of the army — about 70 per cent of its soldiers and officers — is the Punjab. The appropriation of land by officers in the other three provinces stirred up local resentments, particularly in Sindh and Baluchistan, which came to regard it not as a national defence force, but a predatory organisation from the Punjab.

In the most valuable analysis of Pakistan published this year, Ayesha Siddiqa, a London-based academic, describes the reach of Pakistan's military into every part of official and commercial life. In Military Inc — inside Pakistan's Military Economy, she describes how the four foundations set up by the services run cement and sugar plants, among others, taking a share of many parts of commercial life.

“The systematic exploitation of national resources, especially land, has significantly enriched the officer cadre”, Dr Siddiqa writes. The roots lie in a British colonial method of rewarding officers, but an unsurprising result, as the military has acquired a greater commercial stake, is that it has become ever more unwilling to see thoroughgoing democracy restored.

Musharraf has done a great deal for Pakistan: restoring its economy, renewing ties with the US, taking the heat out of the Kashmir dispute with India, and most surprising (because he had no need to do so), championing women's rights. But his pursuit of terrorism has been erratic and inflammatory, costly in military casulties and damaging to army morale. His heavy-handed reliance on military solutions has inflamed local resentments in Baluchistan and Sindh.

His justification for continued military rule has always been the need for security — and his response now may well be to call for emergency powers. But his use of military solutions where political ones were needed has provoked much of this year's turmoil. After Benazir's death, many will be tempted to see the military as the best bulwark against civil war, yet in all but the very short term, the military is more likely to provoke social disorder than rescue Pakistan from that fate.

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