MURREE, PAKISTAN — Beckoned by public spigots promising free, pure drinking water, tourists lined up last week to refresh themselves along the main drag in Murree, a summer resort town perched at 7,500 feet in the Himalayas.
They soon discovered that the taps were dry.
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“We’ve gotten nothing,” said one thirsty visitor, Abdul Sattar, 47. And he wasn’t just talking about pani (water), which hasn’t reached Murree for weeks because severe power shortages have shut down pumping stations in the valley below.
Nothing has come from democracy, either, a frustrated Sattar said — at least not as it is practiced by the barely functioning federal government in Islamabad, an hour’s drive down the mountains.
The economy is bad enough to make Sattar and others nostalgic for military rule, when the generals at least kept the nation’s lights on.
“The military is better,” said Amir Iqbal, who co-owns Mr. Food, a small eatery which had just two lunchtime customers. At 44, he recalls fondly the relative prosperity and higher economic growth rates that marked the nine-year regime of Gen. Pervez Musharraf. And, although he was young at the time, he speaks positively of the era of an earlier strongman, Gen. Muhammad Zia ul Haq.
“When the army is in government they keep inflation low,” Iqbal said. “They are good at governance and better organized.”
Such yearnings for order are certainly not new in Pakistan’s 64-year history: The army, generally with popular support, has stepped in three times to topple weak governments and impose martial law.
Judicial obeisance to the generals used to be the norm. But, styling itself as a corruption-battling people’s advocate, the current Supreme Court has inverted the narrative. It has spearheaded investigations into misdeeds of the executive branch and the military.
Some experts call Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry the country's most powerful man. Critics accuse him of mounting a “judicial coup” in the name of the rule of law.
His court picked off long-serving Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani last month for refusing to follow its orders and is poised to oust his successor for the same thing. A power struggle among the judiciary, the executive branch and, to a lesser extent, the army, threatens to destabilize the nuclear-armed nation at a time when its counterterrorism partnership with the United States has essentially fallen apart.
A slow stumble
Whatever its shortcomings, Pakistan’s coalition government has prevailed for 41 / 2 years without a coup, assassination or execution of a top leader and is on track to become the longest-serving civilian government in the country’s history.
But nobody knows how long the country can continue its slow stumble toward actual democracy: Pakistan, battling an Islamic insurgency, now faces a constitutional crisis during an economic meltdown coupled with devolving public order, as power-outage protests turn into deadly riots.
“Democracy has brought darkness to the country, that’s it,” said political analyst and columnist Farrukh Saleem. He noted that since the end of Musharraf’s rule, the price of milk has tripled and electricity has risen 500 percent.
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