WE are not fit for democracy. Of this I am becoming increasingly certain. It is not that we lack the requisite tolerance. We just do not seem to have the competence and temperament for it.

Forget about parliamentarians and their pathetic performance of the past 15 years. When was the last time anyone read of a meeting of the Lahore High Court Bar Association at which the honourable members were not about to come to blows? Is there a single university in the country where reading and writing are taken seriously or where various student factions do not try to exercise control through violence or the ever-present threat of it?

Of no institution is this more true than the army-led Punjab University - yes, we have managed to pull off a world first by installing retired generals there as vice-chancellors - where, for more years than I can count, political activism of a narrow kind has made nonsense of anything that has to do with education. If this be the state of the champions of the rule of law, which is what lawyers in their less rowdy moments imagine themselves to be, and of centres of higher learning (some joke, this) what foundations of democracy are we talking about?

Military theoreticians, a deadly species, are guilty of sophistry when they cite low literacy levels as an impediment to democracy. Such self-serving arguments need not be taken seriously. Pakistan has been brought to its present pass by its educated elite, not its untutored masses.

I must also confess to a prejudice. I have seen Muslim Leaguers in full bloom and PPP stalwarts in all their glory and I do not know which comes off greater: their all too plain ineptitude (forget greed, a quality common to all aspiring Pakistanis) or their preening arrogance. Talk of Roman senators or a Nazi gauleiter: they would not walk with half the self-importance of a Pakistani politico flush with any kind of authority. Seen up close, this phenomenon never ceases to amaze.

But it is not more amazing than the street-walker morality of the Pakistani bureaucrat who will readily offer his services to any master. Every Pakistani government, civil or military, has had its bureaucratic facilitators adept at the misuse and perversion of authority. The comparison with street-walkers might indeed be inappropriate. Street-walkers on occasion are capable of loyalty. Try catching a mandarin in this mode. No wonder the two most famous approvers in Pakistani history have been bureaucrats.

But, and here's the Pakistani conundrum, if we are unfit for democracy we are no better suited for strong government. While it is no longer fashionable to look approvingly on authoritarianism, strong and ruthless government is not without its uses or indeed its appeal to countries such as Pakistan where the authoritarian tradition, despite appearances to the contrary, runs deep.

Authoritarianism, however, is not simply a matter of looking tough and behaving senselessly. To be effective and successful it needs (paradoxical though this may sound) a greater refinement of culture than democracy. In particular it requires the fulfilment of two conditions: (1) inspired if not messianic leadership; and (2) the mobilization of the masses so that national energies, instead of being dissipated, are concentrated on a single point.

In Pakistan we might as well ask for the moon as these conditions are beyond us to meet. For leaders we have had tinpot figures, each more empty than the other. As for the mobilization of the masses, only two leaders achieved this: Bhutto in these parts and Shaikh Mujib across the seas. Both came to sticky ends. Shaikh Mujib's fate is no longer relevant to our history but Bhutto's is. He had great qualities but also enormous failings and ultimately it were his failings which brought him low. But there is something else which must also be kept in mind. The state of Pakistan does not seem to be programmed to accept leaders with brains above the national average. If through a quirk of fate another intelligent figure tries to make a splash in the murky waters of Pakistani politics, there is little reason to think his fate will be any different from Bhutto's.

As for Jinnah, he was really the exception which proves the rule. The community he came from - with its habits of prudence, thrift and hard work honed over generations - can scarcely be called representative of present-day, mainstream Pakistani society. Jinnah was an extremely successful professional who, when fame came his way, was most at home with the Bombay aristocracy. He had nothing in common with the Punjabi and Sindhi landowners who formed the Muslim leadership class in these parts. The relationship between Jinnah and this class was one of mutual necessity and not the product of any natural affinity.

Those who came after him - the Ghulam Muhammads, the Iskander Mirzas, the Ayub Khans - were truer sons of the soil with none of Jinnah's finicky concern for such abstractions as constitutionalism and the rule of law. When we moan the fact that we have failed to live up to Jinnah's ideals we forget that the soil of what came to be Pakistan was not particularly well-suited for receiving the seeds of such exotic plants as democracy. West Punjab, Sindh, the Frontier and Balochistan were the western marches of the British Indian Empire and between these regions and central and eastern India where the British presence had been longer there lay a world of difference.

After Jinnah's death the Muslim League leadership did not stray from the high road of democratic principle. This charge is false. Never having been on that highway, there was no question of straying from it.

So knowing where we come from should teach us to be less harsh on ourselves. If we have crucified democracy it is because culture and history predisposed us towards this sacrifice. The greater failure is the failure of dictatorship. With the feudal tradition of Punjab and Sindh, the military recruiting tradition of Punjab, and the tribal traditions of the Frontier province and Balochistan, the circumstances were right for raising an enduring temple to authoritarianism. It is Pakistan's abiding tragedy that its despots have proved more egregious failures, and more empty vessels, than its putative democrats. In the history of Pakistan that remains to be written, it is not the failure of democracy that will engage the closest attention of the historian but the failure of militarism and dictatorship.

It might have been supposed that General Musharraf had a chance of bucking this historical trend. No such luck as every passing day brings fresh proof of the strange inadequacy dogging the heels of this government. What are the hallmarks of its performance? A total inability to see the wood for the trees, the total absence of any sense of direction, the needless involving of the army in every sphere of national life, and, strangest of all, an irresistible penchant for opening unprepared fronts - now against smugglers and gun-runners, the next day against traders and religious schools - and then, even before battle is joined, galloping off into the sunset in headlong retreat. Don Quixote charged at the windmills. This government is making a virtue of challenging the windmills from a distance and then running off in the opposite direction.

The anti-blasphemy issue furnishes the latest example of this new method of warfare. Whatever urban begums or NGOs might say, there was no pressing need to touch this issue at this time. The government has more serious issues on its plate. But egged on by God knows whom, General Musharraf in full public view announced a procedural change in the anti-blasphemy law. He need not have done it but having made the announcement should have stuck to it, especially since what was envisaged was a minor change in the procedure and not the substance of the law. But faced with the battle-cries of the religious parties, the General lost no time in announcing a precipitate retreat.

As that old Punjabi saying goes, maternal grandmother (naani) should not have contracted another marriage late in life. But if against better judgment she had decided to go ahead, she should have stuck to it instead of making herself a further object of ridicule by seeking a quick divorce. More often than is good for it, this 'decisive' government resembles nothing so much as that love-lorn maternal grandmother, caught between this and that.