Difficulty of spreading democracy throughout the world

Of all the understandings of the democratic idea, none could be more wrong than this one. Democracy at its very core is an antidote to the kind of dynastic revenge young Bilawal Bhutto suggested.

For the Bhuttos, elections are a means for the family to regain power. Benazir was always avenging the death of her father, the former prime minister hanged two years after a coup. Bilawal is now pledged to do the same for his mother's martyrdom. The Pakistan People's Party has always been a wholly owned family subsidiary.

Like his mother, Bilawal would avenge the political murder of a parent not with violence, but at the ballot box. But his assumption of aristocratic entitlement clangs against his professed fealty to democratic means.

His mother was the same. In more than one journalistic profile, she was characterized as "a democrat who appeals to feudal loyalties."

Part of the reason for the precariousness of Pakistan's democracy is precisely that it remains a largely feudal society practicing democratic forms.

But Pakistan is hardly alone. The very same week Pakistan nearly imploded, a close and disputed election sent Kenya, heretofore one of the more stable democracies in Africa, into a convulsion of tribal violence.

Russia acquiesces cravenly as its nascent democracy is systematically dismantled by Czar Vladimir.

China even more apathetically continues to concede stewardship of its market economy and modernizing society to a Leninist dictatorship. Economic liberalization does not necessarily lead to political liberalization.

This comes after the Palestinians, in their first post-Arafat parliamentary election, give the mandate to a terrorist group. And as Lebanon watches Syrian proxies systematically kill one member of parliament after another to deny the democrats the quorum they need to elect a like-minded president.

These defeats challenge the core Bush notion that American foreign policy should be predicated on trying to spread democracy.

Six years after 9/11 there still is no plausible alternative to the Bush Doctrine for ultimately changing the culture from which jihadism arises. But while spreading democracy may be necessary, can it, in fact, be done?

We know that it can, of course, as demonstrated by our success in turning Germany, Japan and South Korea into important democratic allies. But there we had the rare advantage of uncontested postwar occupation.

What is required in conditions of far less control? A healthy respect for the enduring power of local political primitivism and a willingness to adapt to it.

In Afghanistan, that means accepting radical decentralization and the power of warlords. In Iraq, that means letting centralized top-down governance give way, at least temporarily, to provincial and tribal autonomy.

And in Pakistan, that means accepting both the enduring presence of feudal politics and the pre-eminent role of the military, Pakistan's one functioning national institution, as a guarantor of the state -- even (as in another secular Islamic country, Turkey) at the cost of giving it extra-constitutional authority.

It also means accepting the reality that Pervez Musharraf, he of dubious democratic credentials, is not to be abandoned because his fall would unleash the deluge.

These are hard days for democracy. That is not a reason for giving up on it.

It is a reason for the prudent acceptance and nurturing of local variants.

For the spread of democracy today, we need to learn not to abandon the field when forced to settle for regional adaptations that fall short of the Jeffersonian ideal.

© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group