As Max pointed out in an earlier post, Pakistan is too distracted by internal difficulties to devote necessary attention to the Taliban and al Qaeda forces in its frontier regions. Today, prosecutors said they would proceed with money laundering and corruption charges against Nawaz Sharif. Lawyers for the former Pakistani prime minister said the allegations against their client are politically motivated.

That assertion has the ring of truth. A September 6 parliamentary vote will select a president to replace Pervez Musharraf, who resigned in the middle of last month. Sharif broke away from the ruling coalition on August 25. His former ally, Asif Ali Zardari, is expected to win the presidency. Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto and the head of the Pakistan People’s Party, was known to be corrupt when his wife was prime minister.

It’s no wonder that democracy has a bad name in the country, where politics are not only corrupt but unstable. It was another period of corruption and instability that led Musharraf, then head of the army, to seize power in a 1999 coup from the democratically-elected Sharif. So it’s fair to ask whether the country is headed toward another cycle of corruption, instability and repression.

That is, of course, possible in Pakistan, where anything bad can happen. Of course, Pakistani politicians, like Sharif and Zardari, will go back to their old way of doing things if left to their own devices. Yet history does not always repeat itself, and now there is a new factor in Pakistani politics. The people of that country took great risks to restore representative governance, flooding into the streets last year when Musharraf was removing their judges, closing down the independent media, and taking apart their constitution. They eventually succeeded in getting rid of him in a peaceful manner, and it’s unlikely they will now let rapacious pols loot their society.

Some may say that things are getting worse this week with the charging of Sharif and the election of Zardari, but they may actually be getting better. Of course, it’s way too early to claim success, but we can say that Pakistan, for the first time in a decade, has the opportunity to create a more stable politics under the watchful eye of its people.