Ms. Bhutto, from a wealthy land-owning family in the southern province of Sindh, and Mr. Sharif, son of a Punjab family whose industrial empire floated on huge government loans that were never repaid, surrounded themselves with cronies from similar backgrounds and seemed immune to the state of near-collapse to which their policies drove Pakistan. Both governments had reputations as deeply corrupt.
In 2005, Transparency International, a London-based agency that monitors corruption, said Pakistan under Ms. Bhutto had been the second-most-corrupt country in the world.
An investigation by The New York Times in 1998, drawing on dozens of bank statements and letters handed to British and American investigators by a disaffected Bhutto family lawyer in Switzerland, showed that French, Swiss and Middle Eastern companies, among others, had paid tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks on Pakistan government contracts into offshore bank accounts held by Ms. Bhutto and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari. When a reporter showed copies of the bank documents to Mr. Zardari in Karachi’s central prison, where he was held by Mr. Sharif’s second government, he leafed casually through the papers before handing them back.
The bank statements were genuine, he said airily, as though confident – justifiably, as it transpired over the next eight years, which ended with his release from prison and flight, like Ms. Bhutto, into self-exile – that nothing much would ever be proved against the couple in a Pakistani court. But what bothered him, he said during a conversation in the prison governor’s office, was not so much the fact that a lawyer the couple had trusted had leaked their personal banking documents to investigators; it was The New York Times’s decision to investigate the financial dealings of himself and Ms. Bhutto, rather than others, including Mr. Sharif, who, he said, had grown rich in power.
“You could investigate anybody who has held power in this country, and you’d find the same.” he said. “Why us?”
In many respects, the country’s military rulers have governed little better, and, many Pakistanis would argue, in some ways even worse. But until relatively recently, when the growing brazenness of Islamic militant attacks and the army’s heavy-handed responses began to seriously erode his support, General Musharraf won popular approval with economic policies that attracted the heaviest foreign investment inflows in Pakistan’s history, and an annual growth rate that came close to matching India’s, averaging about 7 percent. Many in the middle class who now clamor for his removal spoke of the general with admiration, acknowledged that he seemed personally uncorrupt, and remarked on how matters had improved with the removal of Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Sharif.
