The shambles in Pakistan debunks once more the illusion that dictators are competent

Deep in the human heart lies the longing for a dictator. Someone to straighten out the mess the politicians have made. Someone to round up the chisellers and the thieves. Someone to end all the bickering and cut through the red tape. A Caesar. A good czar. A man on horseback.

Even in modern, democratic societies, there is a grudging admiration for the efficiency of the autocrat. Mussolini made the trains run on time, didn't he? And Hitler got Germans working again. They may have been monsters, we tell ourselves, but by golly they got things done.

Vladimir Putin, for all his faults, is making Russia shape up in ways that the crapulous Boris Yeltsin never could. The authoritarian Chinese seem to build superhighways overnight, while the democratic Indians merely talk (and talk and talk) about building them.

But take a look at the record, and the claims made for the efficiency of autocrats quickly fall apart. Most of them are terrible bumblers.

Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf had a firm grip on power until he fired the chief of the Supreme Court last spring, an act of breathtaking hubris that angered fair-minded Pakistanis and set off the democratic movement that led to the return, then assassination, of Benazir Bhutto.

Iraq's "wily" Saddam Hussein turned out to be the Inspector Clouseau of tyrants. He plunged his country into a futile war with Iran that took eight years and cost a million lives, invaded Kuwait only to be tossed out by the countries he had counted on not to respond and then concealed the fact that he did not, in fact, possess weapons of mass destruction - a revelation that would surely have forestalled the invasion that robbed him of his power and eventually his life.

Fatally prone to disastrous miscalculation - think of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, or Hitler's on the Soviet Union - authoritarian regimes are often inept at the day-to-day business of government too. Whether Mussolini really made the trains run on time is a matter of dispute (some historians say that upgrades to the rail system by previous, democratic government deserve the credit). What is clear is that his boasts about the rapid progress of the muscular new Fascist Italy were mostly empty bravado. "In reality, behind the scenery of modernization and industrial investments, millions of Italians still lived a life of prehistoric squalor, and most of the fundamental problems of the country had been left practically untouched," the great journalist Luigi Barzini wrote later.

INEPT LEFT, INEPT RIGHT

Hitler's Germany was much the same. Behind the image of jackbooted efficiency, the Third Reich was a bit of a shambles. With his disdain for bureaucracy and faith in the power of personal will, Hitler overrode the ordinary machinery of government and appointed favourites like Hermann Goering to key economic and political posts. A welter of competing power centres emerged, often working at cross-purposes. What looked from the outside like a highly organized and centralized state under a single, all-powerful leader was in fact a species of "authoritarian anarchy."

Partly as a result, Germany failed to achieve the massive feat of economic organization that was needed to win a long war. The supposedly feeble and poorly organized democracies, notably Britain and the United States, were far better at reordering their economies for sustained conflict.

Totalitarian regimes of the left proved to be equally ham-handed, if not more so. In its early years, the Soviet Union looked like a marvel of economic efficiency, producing new dams, canals and factories that seemed to prove the dynamism of a system in which every enterprise was planned and controlled by the state. "I have seen the future and it works," the American journalist Lincoln Steffens exclaimed after a visit to Russia in the 1920s.

It didn't. When the Soviet system finally collapsed under its own dead weight in 1991, it left rusting warships, Dickensian factories, crumbling apartment blocks and leaky toxic-waste dumps in its wake.

The Soviet Union was a marvel of efficiency next to Mao's China, which employed the masses in fanciful projects like building backyard steel furnaces. That folly was part of the disastrous Great Leap Forward that led to one of modern history's worst man-made famines. Mao once even called on the Chinese people to eradicate sparrows (considered a pest) by banging pots and pans together until, unable to perch, they fell from the sky in exhaustion.

RARE EXCEPTIONS TO THE RULE

Of course, there are contrary examples. South Korea's military rulers built the foundations of an economic powerhouse. Chile's Augusto Pinochet pushed through a successful program of free-market economic reform. The Singapore built by strongman Lee Kuan Yew is one of the best-run places in Asia.

But more often the result of authoritarian rule is the dismal stagnation of military-ruled Myanmar, the train wreck of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe or the grim prison of Kim Jong Il's North Korea. The whole Arab world is one great showcase for gross inefficiency of autocrats. Ruled to this day by a parcel of oil sheikhs, presidents for life and theocrats, it has fallen far behind most other regions in terms of education, economic vigour and other measures.

You might think that after a century and more of experience of the gross ineptitude, instability and often sheer stupidity of tyrants of right and left, we might have learned something about their true nature. Instead, our illusions persist. As late as 1984, no less a figure than the economist John Kenneth Galbraith was praising the "solid well-being of people in the streets" of Russia.

The myth of authoritarian efficiency stays with us to this day. Many Pakistanis welcomed Pervez Musharraf when he seized power in 1999 despite the evidence that previous military regimes had stunted the development of the country. After 9/11, Washington embraced him, too. Here was the man, with his good English and his crisp army uniform, who could finally set his troubled country straight.

Many believe that Vladimir Putin is doing just that for Russia. In fact, say American scholars Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss in the current Foreign Affairs, this too is a myth. Russia was a mess under Boris Yeltsin not because it was democratic but because it was suffering from the sudden collapse of the bankrupt communist regime. If its economy is growing today, it has more to do with rising oil prices than any efficiency of Putinism. Russia's ratings for economic competitiveness, corruption and business-friendliness have all fallen under Mr. Putin.

We are equally deluded about modern China. With its teeming factories and thrusting skyscrapers, the People's Republic is a modern-day marvel - proof, it seems, that authoritarian politics combined with capitalist economics can deliver the goods without the muss and fuss of democracy. Often overlooked are the immense internal problems, from migrant workers to rampant pollution to persistent rural poverty. Chinese stage an average of 200 protests a day over everything from illegal land seizures to unpaid wages.

Led by an unelected clique of technocrats and party bosses, China's government is singularly ill-equipped to cope with the complex problems of a modern state. When the SARS crisis hit the country, its first reaction was to cover up. When the toxic toy scandal broke out, it lashed out at the West for smearing China's name. How it will react in a more serious crisis - an economic recession, conflict with Taiwan - is anyone's guess. In a new book, former Clinton administration official Susan Shirk labels China the Fragile Superpower .

SELF-DOUBTING DEMOCRACY

Indeed, the claim that autocracies are stable is as thin as the claim for their efficiency. Countless times over the past decades, democratic governments have supported dictators and strongmen on the grounds that, though they may be brutal and corrupt, they can at least stand in the way of revolution and anarchy. This is usually an illusion. Without the independent institutions and network of laws that underpin stable government, and usually lacking plans for orderly succession, authoritarian regimes have the consistency of peanut brittle, hard until it snaps. The Western-supported Suharto regime in Indonesia looked like a model of stable development right up to the moment it fell in a spasm of rioting set off by the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s.

Why do we continue to believe in the efficiency of authoritarian regimes despite all the evidence to the contrary? One reason is a stubborn lack of faith in our own system of government. Democracy has delivered unheard-of levels of freedom, security and prosperity to hundreds of millions of people. Yet the remarkable fact is that large numbers of those people don't really believe in it. Rising numbers dismiss politicians as knaves or fools and politics as a dirty game played mainly for money. Fewer and fewer voters, especially young voters, bother to cast a ballot.

The idea of exporting democracy to other countries has taken a walloping in Iraq, and those who advocate it are written off as wild-eyed idealists or blinkered neo-imperialists. If the Russians like a strongman like Mr. Putin, why should we rain on their parade? Why shouldn't other countries choose strong, even authoritarian, government over the messy compromises and circus theatrics of modern democracy?

The answer is paradoxical: because the circus works. Despite its often chaotic appearance, democracy is a far more efficient form of government than the orderly parade of strongman rule.

As the editor of Newsweek International, Fareed Zakaria, writes in his book The Future of Democracy , "a strong government is different from an effective government; in fact, the two may be contradictory." Isolated from public opinion, a strongman often fails to see the problems lying just around the corner. Democracies, by contrast, can anticipate problems and build coalitions to solve them. Put simply, democracy delivers.

This will strike many people in democratic countries as dubious. If they believe in democracy at all, it is usually for moral, not practical, reasons. Democracy may be fairer and more just, but more efficient? Surely not.

Yet that is what the record shows. Believe it or not: democracy, not dictatorship, makes the trains run on time.

2008 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.