Pakistan is a country of enormous geopolitical importance. The second largest Muslim country in the world by population, it has always confronted two insecure borders: in the west with Afghanistan, which does not recognize the Durand line marking their mutual frontier, and in the east with India, which controls much of the disputed region of Kashmir. India is seen by Pakistan’s military as the preeminent threat, although this is not necessarily the case among average Pakistanis, who generally seek normal relations and greater economic engagement with India. Pakistan’s army has also sought to influence governments and events in Afghanistan since the 1980s, and the many years of warfare in that country have stymied Pakistan’s efforts to create trade routes to Central Asia. Meanwhile, Pakistan has become increasingly dependent on the Middle East for jobs, remittances, and government loans.

A section of the liberal intelligentsia in Pakistan believes that Pakistani society has demonstrated over time its basic inability to move the country onto a democratic path. These frustrated reformists therefore pin their hopes on international pressure, enhanced by Pakistan’s economic and strategic dependence on powerful friends like the United States, to push the state and society along a course of incremental change.

The problem with such hopes is that no state or society in history has been transformed along democratic lines through foreign influence alone, no matter how benign. Recent failures in Afghanistan and Iraq only serve to reinforce this lesson. Without the political will and vision of a significant section of the citizenry and political class to carry out far-reaching reforms, no credible democratic order is likely to see the light of day in Pakistan in the foreseeable future. The current elected civilian government largely represents the traditional political class, which has predictably returned to its habits of rent-seeking, patronage, and a singular lack of serious debate. The October 2008 in-camera security briefing to a joint session of Parliament provided jarring evidence of the legislators’ lack of deep consideration of what is arguably the greatest threat to the state in Pakistan’s short and violent history.

These weaknesses and antidemocratic tendencies within the political establishment leave the door open to military influence, the real obstacle to democratic progress. Although the new army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, has ostensibly distanced the army from politics, Pakistan’s own history and similar cases in the developing world suggest that such retreats tend to be tactical rather than strategic. The essentially unreformed military retains the wherewithal to reenter the political fray as the nation’s self-anointed savior once its public image recovers from the damaging association with Musharraf.

While foreign powers cannot control Pakistan’s democratic development by standing in for the moribund political class and staring down the military, they do not have the option of allowing the country to succumb to an economic meltdown and a jihadi insurgency, not the least because a nuclear arsenal is at risk. Even under current conditions, there are suspicions that confessed nuclear proliferator A. Q. Khan—recently freed from house arrest by the courts— and his international technology-trading network could resume their clandestine activities.

U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan have consequently watched with great interest as Pakistan struggles to cope with the Taliban insurgency. Until recently they had strong misgivings about attempts by the Pakistani authorities to reach negotiated political settlements with the Pakistani Taliban. However, given the growing sense that the existing military strategy in Afghanistan has failed, the United States and NATO are warming to the idea of negotiations with “moderate” elements of the Afghan Taliban. Such talks could conceivably lead to a power-sharing arrangement in Kabul, followed by a hasty withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces. Pakistanis, perhaps with the exception of the military, cannot view this possibility with sanguinity. An eventual restoration of the Afghan Taliban regime, or a renewed Afghan civil war following a foreign troop pullout, would embolden the triumphant Pakistani Taliban to effectively overrun the state. There would clearly be little room for democracy in such an environment.

If Pakistan’s international friends and supporters are to prevent these sorts of outcomes, they must play their role in encouraging the evolution of democratic institutions. The country’s elected representatives arguably need help to comprehend the advantages of pulling their weight in the transition to a genuinely democratic order. Only a fully engaged civilian leadership, supported and corrected by a well-informed electorate, can wrest control of Pakistan’s domestic governance and policymaking away from the military and its antidemocratic fellow-travelers.