Collision course?

Benazir Bhutto is dead, but the person whose reputation has suffered the greatest damage in the past one week is Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf. His and the government's reputations are in tatters. Only a properly conducted election, with a clear winner, will retrieve lost ground for the man who started out as a straight-dealing, blunt-spoken general, who has been reduced to a pale shadow of his old self, minus both swagger and swagger stick.

Consider the different issues on which Mr Musharraf and his government stand exposed. First, there is the issue of the security provided to Ms Bhutto. Despite the attack on her and on her welcome procession when she landed in Karachi two months ago, which left 140 dead, Mr Musharraf could not be prodded into providing full security cover for the person who was most likely to become prime minister after the elections, though Ms Bhutto demanded it repeatedly. Then, in the wake of last week's assassination in none other than the army town of Rawalpindi, the government put out within 24 hours a transcript of a telephone conversation which purported to show that al Qaeda's hand was involved, while simultaneously there was a claim released through unusual channels in which al Qaeda allegedly claimed responsibility for the assassination. The result has been denials and scepticism, and no one knows the truth.

The government's credibility on assassination-related issues was soon damaged beyond repair when a spokesman of the interior ministry made the ludicrous claim that Ms Bhutto died, not from bullet wounds but because she banged her head on a sun roof lever "" a claim that was first contested by people who handled the body and then disproved by video shots of the whole outrage. Reports also spoke of doctors being pressured to file reports that fudged the cause of death, which suggested that the cover-up began within an hour or so of the shooting "" itself a tell-tale sequence. The government quickly backtracked, then did another U-turn and, its case in tatters because of the mounting evidence, tried to do damage control by promising Scotland Yard's involvement in the investigation. This is not going to do any good, because what is the Yard going to investigate? The body has been buried, the assassins are either dead or missing, the scene of the crime has been washed clean of all evidence, and the alleged mastermind in the frontier area is not about to offer himself up for cross-examination. And if the investigation were to turn in another direction, how deep into the Pakistan government's recesses will it be allowed to delve, if at all?

Even more serious, though, is the charge that Ms Bhutto had evidence of how the Pak army's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was getting ready to rig the elections, evidence that she was about to present to two American lawmakers on the day she was killed. If there is any truth to this, then there must be severe scepticism about the manner in which the elections (now postponed to February despite protests) will be conducted. It would also mean that the army and those who control it are simply not reconciled to popular civilian rule. All these are pointers to the very real danger that the principal protagonists are set on a collision course. One way to prevent that would be through internationally supervised elections, and/or the presence of a large number of external observers. This is the minimum that should now be asked of President Musharraf.