WHEN Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, the killers struck in Rawalpindi, an ancient garrison town, on the edge of a leafy park named for another Pakistani who had served as prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan; he was assassinated in the park in 1951. Barely a mile away, Ms. Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, another former prime minister, was hanged in 1979 at the city’s central jail. One of the doctors who failed to reanimate Ms. Bhutto at a Rawalpindi hospital was the son of a doctor who similarly failed to save Liaquat Ali Khan.

The killings varied widely — Liaquat Ali Khan was shot by a Pashtun separatist; Mr. Bhutto was hanged after a court appointed by a military dictator found him guilty of murdering a minor political opponent from Baluchistan; and the question of who sent the suicide bomber and the gunman who attacked Ms. Bhutto on Dec. 27 is the subject of an investigation in which the Pakistani police will be assisted by experts from Scotland Yard.

Still, the historic coincidence of all three leaders dying in Rawalpindi, in the same quarter of the city, has underscored how often violent death has reshaped the political map of Pakistan, and, too, how slender is the thread that sustains the country’s hopes of establishing a stable democracy.

For 60 years since its founding in the partitioning of British India, Pakistan has seesawed between military dictatorships and elected governments, and now new hope for stability is being placed on the chance that democracy there can be revived.

But while attention is currently focused on the failings of Pervez Musharraf, the latest in a long line of military rulers, Pakistan’s civilian leaders, too, have much to account for in the faltering history of Pakistani democracy. Over the decades, their own periods in office have been notable mostly for their weakness, their instinct for political score-settling, and their venality.

Now more than ever, hopes of the country achieving lasting stability weigh far beyond Pakistan’s border. For the United States, the stakes include the prospects of prevailing against Al Qaeda and the Taliban along Pakistan’s Afghan border; linked to that is the sobering issue of who will control Pakistan’s nuclear armory.

With President Musharraf facing mounting popular opposition, the United States has used its influence to persuade him that the best and perhaps only hope of restoring stability is to allow a revival of a form of democracy — elections for a new government that would co-exist with him as president. It is a long shot, and the odds against it have lengthened considerably with the killing of Ms. Bhutto. But even as plans for an election proceed, there is reason to fear that a return to elected government would be anything but a panacea.

While widely lauded in the West, Pakistan’s current generation of civilian politicians — indeed, most of its civilian political leaders, going back to the country’s origins in the partition of British India in 1947 — have repeatedly failed to bring the stability and prosperity they have promised. And the reasons for their failure, many who know Pakistan’s history have concluded, rest about as heavily with the politicians as with the generals.

As much as anybody in Pakistan’s history, Ms. Bhutto built a reputation as a campaigner for democracy, and it is for that that she has been principally eulogized. Twice prime minister in the 1990’s before moving into self-exile abroad, she returned in October saying she hoped to rescue Pakistan from nearly a decade of rule by Mr. Musharraf, one of four generals who have held near-absolute power for just over half of Pakistan’s existence. But her death raises anew the question that has dogged Pakistan from its founding: when, or perhaps whether, Pakistan will begin the long march toward building a democracy worthy of the name.

The legend cultivated by Pakistani politicians like Ms. Bhutto and her principal civilian rival, Nawaz Sharif, cast the generals as the main villains in stifling democracy, emerging from their barracks to grab power out of Napoleonic ambition and contempt for the will of ordinary Pakistanis. It is a version of history calculated to appeal strongly to Western opinion. But it has been carefully drawn to excuse the role the politicians themselves have played in undermining democracy, by using mandates won at the polls to establish governments that rarely amounted to much more than vehicles for personal enrichment, or for pursuing vendettas against political foes.

William Dalrymple, a British author who has written widely about India and Pakistan, put it bluntly in an article for Britain’s left-of-center Guardian newspaper in 2005. “As Pakistan shows, rigid, corrupt, unrepresentative and flawed democracies without the strong independent institutions of a civil society — a free press, an independent judiciary, an empowered election commission — can foster governments that are every bit as tyrannical as any dictatorship,” he wrote. “Justice and democracy are not necessarily synonymous.”

Historians trace some of Pakistan’s problems to the British conquest of Moghul India, when centuries of Muslim rule in the subcontinent gave way to an era when Muslims, alwaysn suspect among the British for resisting their new colonial masters, became ever more an underclass.

When the struggle for Indian independence began in earnest in the 1920’s, the leadership rested mainly with Hindus — especially Gandhi, whose philosophy was egalitarian, secular and nationalist. In the 1930’s, the Muslim League began agitating for a separate Muslim homeland, but power within the league rested with Mohammed Ali Jinnah, an elitist, British-educated Bombay lawyer with a taste for expensively-tailored suits and little affinity for the common man. He would become Pakistan’s founding father.

Many of those who gathered around Jinnah were from the feudal landowning class, and tribal leaders. With scant interest in democracy, their concerns centered more on the protection of their ancestral privileges. When the British abandoned the struggle to fashion an independent India that would keep Hindus and Muslims together, the landowning aristocrats and the tribal chiefs became the political elite of Pakistan. From the beginning, they vied for power with the generals, in a struggle that intensified when the revered Jinnah died soon after Pakistan was established.

Partition in 1947 was accompanied by widespread killing by Hindu and Muslim militants, and more than 10 million people migrated across the new frontiers. For Pakistan, much the smaller of the two new nations, survival as an independent state became the prevailing concern, empowering the generals. Three wars with India further entrenched military power. And in 1958, after a decade in which the army worked behind the scenes to unseat weak civilian leaders, Gen. Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s first military ruler, declared martial law.

Beginning in the 1950’s, the United States wielded strong influence with the generals, who allied Pakistan with the West in the cold war, then in the struggle in the 1980s against the Soviets in Afghanistan and, since 2001, in the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Long before President Bush made Mr. Musharraf an ally, American policy was based on a hard-nosed assessment of America’s strategic interests that favored the generals over civilian politicians.

The politicians made these choices easier by their own failings in power. Among these was Ms. Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He came to prominence as foreign minister under a martial-law government led by Gen. Yahya Khan, then emerged from the civil war that gave birth to Bangladesh in 1971 to win election as the first civilian head of government in a truncated Pakistan.

A charismatic leader with a bent for political intrigue, Mr. Bhutto set the path for much that followed. Pakistani historians say his six years in power were marked by rampant disregard for the constitution he drew up in 1973, by widespread arrests of political opponents, and by deployment of the army to quell restiveness in the provinces.

Having founded the Pakistan People’s Party with a strongly egalitarian charter, he turned it into a vehicle for enhancing his personal power, abused civil liberties he had championed on the hustings, and showed little interest in social programs. Overthrown by Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq in 1977, he was given what many Pakistani lawyers regarded as a perfunctory and stage-managed trial for the murder of the Baluchistan politician, and hanged.

CIVILIAN rule was restored after General Zia died in an air crash in 1988, and the next 11 years were spent with a revolving door of elected governments, two headed by Ms. Bhutto, two by Mr. Sharif, before General Musharraf overthrew Mr. Sharif in a coup in 1999. The two civilian leaders governed so poorly, and so corruptly, in the view of many in the educated middle class, that the dismissal of all four governments before they had served their parliamentary terms occasioned little protest. When Ms. Bhutto was removed on the orders of a civilian president she had picked from her own party in 1996, on charges of government incompetence, protests by her supporters subsided in 48 hours.

The Harvard- and Oxford-educated Ms. Bhutto, a populist like her father, promised voters she would lift up Pakistan’s downtrodden millions with radical reform programs, improving education, health and women’s rights. In power, neither she nor Mr. Sharif did much on any of these fronts. Poor Pakistanis ended the 1990’s about where they were under General Zia, with levels of illiteracy, malnutrition, infant mortality and abuse of women that were among the worst in the world.

Ms. Bhutto, from a wealthy land-owning family in the southern province of Sindh, and Mr. Sharif, son of a Punjab family whose industrial empire floated on huge government loans that were never repaid, surrounded themselves with cronies from similar backgrounds and seemed immune to the state of near-collapse to which their policies drove Pakistan. Both governments had reputations as deeply corrupt. In 2005, Transparency International, a London-based agency that monitors corruption, said Pakistan under Ms. Bhutto had been the second-most-corrupt country in the world.

An investigation by The New York Times in 1998, drawing on dozens of bank statements and letters handed to British and American investigators by a disaffected Bhutto family lawyer in Switzerland, showed that French, Swiss and Middle Eastern companies, among others, had paid tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks on Pakistan government contracts into offshore bank accounts held by Ms. Bhutto and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari. When a reporter showed copies of the bank documents to Mr. Zardari in Karachi’s central prison, where he was held by Mr. Sharif’s second government, he leafed casually through the papers before handing them back.

The bank statements were genuine, he said airily, as though confident — justifiably, as it transpired over the next eight years, which ended with his release from prison and flight, like Ms. Bhutto, into self-exile — that nothing much would ever be proved against the couple in a Pakistani court. But what bothered him, he said during a conversation in the prison governor’s office, was not so much the fact that a lawyer the couple had trusted had leaked their personal banking documents to investigators; it was The New York Times’s decision to investigate the financial dealings of himself and Ms. Bhutto, rather than others, including Mr. Sharif, who, he said, had grown rich in power.

“You could investigate anybody who has held power in this country, and you’d find the same.” he said. “Why us?”

In many respects, the country’s military rulers have governed little better, and, many Pakistanis would argue, in some ways even worse. But until relatively recently, when the growing brazenness of Islamic militant attacks and the army’s heavy-handed responses began to seriously erode his support, General Musharraf won popular approval with economic policies that attracted the heaviest foreign investment inflows in Pakistan’s history, and an annual growth rate that came close to matching India’s, averaging about 7 percent. Many in the middle class who now clamor for his removal spoke of the general with admiration, acknowledged that he seemed personally uncorrupt, and remarked on how matters had improved with the removal of Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Sharif.

But if elected governments have yielded Pakistan little until now, those who see democracy as the solution to the country’s problems still have an argument that is hard to refute. If civilian rulers have failed, these advocates of popular rule say, it is because the generals who kept interfering never gave democracy a chance to mature.

“Since democracy was effectively killed in its infancy, the later stages of maturity and experience could not be reached,” Irshad Ahmed Haqqani, a former information minister and newspaper columnist with a wide following in Pakistan, wrote in an article published in 2006 in The Muslim World, an American journal devoted to the study of Islam. “Pakistanis are a normal people and can go as far on the road to democracy as any other nation can. This road we must take; we cannot do without it.”

By JOHN F. BURNS