Since her death at an assassin's hands last Thursday, former Pakistani prime
minister Benazir Bhutto has been virtually canonized by politicians and pundits
alike. Representative of the former was Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary
Clinton, who hailed the deceased as "a leader of tremendous political and
personal courage" whom the New York senator said she had known both "during her
tenures as prime minister and during her years in exile" and could thus vouch
for Bhutto's "concern for her country, and her family, [which] propelled her to
risk her life on behalf of the Pakistani people".
French journalist Bernard-Henri Levy who, gushing that Bhutto was a "beautiful
woman ... a conspicuous, spectacularly visible
woman" and elevating her to a pantheon that included slain US journalist Daniel
Pearl, former Afghan leader Ahmad Shah Massoud and author Salman Rushdie,
complained that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, President George W Bush,
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy failed
to immediately rush to her funeral.
Nowhere to be found in these paeans is any acknowledgment of the slain
politician's far more ambiguous record, a close examination of which reveals
the saint to have been all too human: specifically, as authoritarian and venal
as any run-of-the-mill Third World despot. During Bhutto's second government
(1993-1996), for example, the human rights advocacy group Amnesty International
had cause to publish reports with titles like "Pakistan: Use and Abuse of the
Blasphemy Laws", "Pakistan: The Pattern Persists; Torture, Deaths in Custody,
Disappearances and Extrajudicial Executions under the PPP Government";
"Pakistan: Executions under the Qisas and Diyat Ordinance" and "Pakistan:
Appeal to Ban Public Flogging."
With its feudal levy of sharecropper-voters, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP)
headed by Bhutto (and her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, before her) has never
exactly been a model of democratic practice. As for personal mores, there are
the charges of corruption which have persistently dogged both Benazir Bhutto
and her plutocratic husband (and environment minister), Asif Ali Zardari, and
led to her government falling constitutionally not once, but twice.
Incidentally, the new widower, who will now share the leadership of the PPP
with the couple's 19-year-old son, Bilawal, is still the subject of court
proceedings not just in Pakistan but also in England (where a High Court has
uncovered ownership of a 365-acre Surrey estate that his family long denied
possessing) and Switzerland (where magistrates have frozen more than US$13
million in allegedly illicit proceeds).
The point of recalling these sordid details is not to highlight Bhutto's
political and personal shortcomings, but rather to observe that they produced
not insignificant consequences. Without making excuses for President Pervez
Musharraf's less-than-stellar record with respect to dealing with Islamist
extremists - much less for the motivations of Bhutto's assassin - there is no
denying that the failure of Benazir Bhutto's two administrations to make real
progress on factors which mattered was a major sin of omission - an oversight
that contributed its share to the crisis currently faced by Pakistan and the
world.
In an op-ed entitled "What's Holding Pakistan Back", published as it turns out
the day before the attack in Rawalpindi, former CNN senior correspondent Walter
Rodgers, who is currently teaching in Lahore, argued that "any society that
wants to move toward democracy in any meaningful sense must meet minimum
requirements, including: an educated citizenry, a credible legal culture,
reasonable transparency in government, and real religious tolerance" -
conditions which he found to be woefully lacking in Pakistan today and hence
his judgment that "the hope that 'free and fair elections' in coming days will
produce greater democracy is dubious and naive".
Policymakers in the United States would do well to note that this grim
prognosis came before the murder of Bhutto - whether ultimately pinned on
al-Qaeda and its allies or on their Islamist sympathizers in the shadowy world
of the Pakistani security services - frayed the social fabric even further.
For all her faults, she seems to have been sincere in her recently professed
desire to work to change the country, as even critics like Mansoor Ijaz - whose
exposure of Bhutto's alleged corruption in the pages of The Wall Street Journal
is often cited by PPP supporters as precipitating her second dismissal in 1996
- have acknowledged since her death. Certainly, Bhutto's negotiations with
Musharraf to share power, while ultimately futile, were indicative of a
realistic appraisal of the grave situation Pakistan finds itself in.
They also showed a more mature appreciation of the need for the country's
embattled secular forces, military and civilian, to put aside personal
differences and arrive at a modus vivendi (Bhutto's principal civilian rival,
former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who has a reputation for pandering to
Islamists, is hated by the PPP for his role in prosecuting the Bhutto clan for
corruption).
As Rodgers observed, as ironic as it may seem, Pakistan's "best hope may now
lie in the increasing desperateness of the situation". The reality is that the
nuclear-armed, geostrategically vital country is on the verge of state
collapse. Over one-tenth of the country, including critical areas in the
northwest along the Afghan border, has essentially been abandoned to tribal
leaders, many of whom have links to al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other Islamist
forces.
Last July's US National Intelligence Estimate, it should be recalled, declared
these tribal agencies as a de facto safe haven for Osama bin Laden. Although it
receives little attention abroad, another region, Balochistan - which covers
nearly half of Pakistan's land mass and contains most of the country's energy
resources as well as most of its coastline - is dangerously close to open
secession over its longstanding resentment against the ruling elites in
Islamabad.
The extent to which the president's writ prevails in the remaining one-third of
the land left to the central government now that Musharraf has given up his
uniform under intense pressure from Washington - which has pumped billions into
the country since September 11, 2001, in the hopes of getting greater
counterterrorism cooperation - has yet to be determined. But there may be a ray
of hope amid last week's tragedy.
While no one knows what the living Bhutto may have done to reverse her
country's current perilous course if she had somehow prevailed in the
parliamentary elections originally scheduled for next week, the martyred
Benazir may yet render a final service to Pakistan and the world. If, like the
al-Qaeda attacks on civilians in Iraq, the savagery of Bhutto's death can
somehow galvanize Pakistan's uniformed and mufti-clad secularists to turn
together against the extremism within their midst and if the need to assuage
international outrage over the assassination can adduce Musharraf to more
energetically tackle the terrorist infrastructure in the country, then maybe
Bhutto would produce a miracle from beyond the grave: a reasonably secure
Pakistan that contributes to international security, rather than undermining
it, by carefully laying the foundations for a stable polity. That feat would
give her hagiographers material with which to write a golden legend that is
more than pious gibberish.
J Peter Pham is the director of the Nelson Institute for International
and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Virginia.
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