NEW YORK, June 14: A Jewish American writer has warned that if former prime minister Benazir Bhutto returns to power, it ‘would almost certainly trigger a return to anarchy and open the door to a Taliban-style fundamentalist coup’.

In a letter to the editor published in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Arthur Herman ridiculed Ms Bhutto’s assertion that ‘more than two-thirds of Pakistanis are distinctly moderate’ in their religious views.

The letter was a retort to the PPP chief’s article published in the newspaper.

Mr Herman argued that President Musharraf ‘has not only been a good ally for America, he has also been good for Pakistan’.

Recalling Ms Bhutto’s stints in power, Mr Herman says ‘as prime minister of Pakistan, Ms Bhutto proved to be one of the most incompetent leaders in the history of South Asia and was dismissed in Nov 1996 by Pakistan’s president for nepotism, corruption and mismanagement’.

“During her chaotic administration in the mid-1990s, scores of people were being murdered in the streets of Karachi every day,’’ he said.

Mr Herman said he believed ‘the current hatred of Gen Musharraf has little to do with the nature of his government. His real crime is that he is a Muhajir — Indian Muslims who fled to Pakistan in 1947’.

The writer observed ‘even for western-educated Pakistanis like Ms Bhutto, the sight of a common Muhajir like Gen Musharraf as Pakistan’s supreme power holder is intolerable. Pushing for his fall has little to do with a return to democracy’.

Mr Herman contended in the letter that the president had not only been a good ally for America, he had been good for Pakistan, too.

At considerable risk to himself, Mr Herman said, Gen Musharraf had been trying to rein in the ‘forces of jihadism and end foreign support for fundamentalist madressahs’.

“The same appeared true of Iranians in 1979 as well. But when Iranian liberals and human rights activists convinced the US to withdraw support for the shah, just as today’s Pakistani liberals are urging us to do to Gen Musharraf, the result was Ayatollah Khomeini’.

Saying that President Musharraf’s ‘government has hardly been perfect’, Mr Herman nevertheless feels that ‘compared with the Maliki government in Iraq, its record is impressive, especially in fostering a safe, relatively open and secular Pakistan’.