Is the United States and wider international community partly responsible for Pakistan’s political meltdown? Even before the year-end slaying of Benazir Bhutto, General Pervez Musharraf’s abrupt imposition of emergency rule triggered the downward spiraling, upending the country’s legal institutions and putting in doubt the legitimacy of the electoral exercise scheduled for next month. While many in Pakistan were galvanized to defend popular sovereignty, in the international community even voices that are usually among the most outspoken in support of democracy have been conspicuously muted. The U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Representative on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders, Hina Jilani, a Pakistani who ironically is now herself in the situation of an embattled human rights defender, led a roundtable discussion at The Century Foundation on 20 December 2007 about Guiding Democracy in Pakistan: Has the International Community Failed? Morton Halperin, director of Century’s project on democracy and U.S. foreign policy, was first respondent at the roundtable, which the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and Amnesty International also cosponsored.