by Ali, Tariq
By the time she was reelected in 1993, she had abandoned all idea of reform, but that she was in a hurry to do something became clear when she appointed her husband minister for investment, making him responsible for all investment offers from home and abroad. The Pakistani press widely alleged that the couple accumulated $1.5 billion. The high command of the Pakistan Peoples Party now became a machine for making money, but without any trickle-down mechanism. This period marked the complete degeneration of the party. The single tradition that had been passed down since the foundation of the party was autocratic centralism. The leader’s word was final. Like her father in this respect, Benazir never understood that debate is not only the best medium of confutation, of turning the ideological tables. It is also the most effective form of persuasion. The debate urgently needed to be shifted out of the paddock of religion and into a more neutral space. This never happened.
All that shamefaced party members could say on corruption, when I asked them during several visits to Pakistan, was “Everybody does it all over the world,” thus accepting that the cash nexus was now all that mattered. Money was now the sacred center of all politics. In foreign policy Benazir’s legacy was mixed. She refused to sanction an anti-Indian military adventure in Kargil on the Himalayan slopes, but to make up for it, as I wrote at the time,* her government pushed through the Taliban takeover in Kabul—which makes it doubly ironic that Washington and London were promoting her as a champion of democracy before her tragic demise.
Murtaza Bhutto had contested the elections from abroad and won a seat in the Sind provincial legislature. He returned home and expressed his unhappiness with his sister’s agenda. Family gatherings became tense. Murtaza had his weaknesses, but he wasn’t corrupt, and he argued in favor of the old party’s radical manifesto. He made it clear that he regarded Zardari as an interloper whose only interest was money. Nusrat Bhutto suggested that Murtaza be made the chief minister of Sind; Benazir’s response was to remove her mother as chairperson of the PPP. Any sympathy Murtaza may have felt for his sister turned to loathing. He no longer felt obliged to control his tongue and at every possible opportunity lambasted Zardari and the corrupt regime over which his sister presided. It was difficult to fault him on the facts. The incumbent chief minister of Sind was Abdullah Shah, one of Zardari’s creatures. He began to harass Murtaza’s supporters. Murtaza decided to confront the organ-grinder himself. According to some, he rang Zardari and invited him round for an informal chat to try to settle the problems within the family. Zardari agreed. As the two men were pacing the garden, Murtaza’s retainers appeared and grabbed Zardari. Someone brought out a cutthroat razor and some warm water and Murtaza shaved off half of Zardari’s mustache to the delight of the retainers, then told him to get lost. A fuming Zardari, who had probably feared much worse, was compelled to shave off the other half at home. The media, bemused, were informed that the new clean-shaven consort had accepted intelligence advice that the mustache made him too recognizable a target. Benazir’s private version for friends was somewhat different. She said the kids disliked it because it prickled when he kissed them and so he dispensed with it for their sake. Both explanations were negated by Zardari’s allowing it to grow again immediately afterward.
Some months later, in September 1996, as Murtaza and his entourage were returning home from a political meeting, they were ambushed, just outside their house, by some seventy armed policemen accompanied by four senior officers. A number of snipers were positioned in surrounding trees. The streetlights had been switched off. Murtaza clearly understood what was happening and got out of his car with his hands raised; his bodyguards were instructed not to use their weapons. Instead, the police opened fire. Seven men were killed, Murtaza among them. The fatal bullet had been fired at close range. The trap had carefully been laid, but as is the way in Pakistan, the crudeness of the operation—false entries in police logbooks, lost evidence, witnesses arrested and intimidated, the provincial PPP governor (regarded as untrustworthy) dispatched to a nonevent in Egypt, a policeman killed who was feared might talk—made it obvious that the decision to execute the prime minister’s brother had been made at a high level. Shoaib Suddle, deputy inspector general of Sind when Murtaza was murdered, was charged with involvement in the killing, but the case was dismissed before it went to trial. He was subsequently promoted to inspector general by Zardari in April 2008. Two months later, he was appointed director general of the Intelligence Bureau in Islamabad.
While the ambush was being prepared, the police had sealed off Murtaza’s house (from which his father had been lifted by Zia’s commandos in 1977). The family inside felt something was wrong, and a remarkably composed Fatima Bhutto, age fourteen, rang her aunt at Prime Minister’s House. The conversation that followed remains imprinted on her memory, and a few years ago she gave me an account of it. Zardari took her call.
FATIMA: I wish to speak to my aunt, please.
ZARDARI: It’s not possible.
FATIMA: Why? [At this point, Fatima says she heard loud wails and what sounded like fake crying.]
ZARDARI: She’s hysterical, can’t you hear?
FATIMA: Why?
ZARDARI: Don’t you know? Your father’s been shot.
Fatima and Ghinwa found out where Murtaza had been taken and rushed out of the house. The street outside showed no sign that anything had happened: the scene of the killing had been wiped clean of all evidence, with no traces of blood or signs of disturbance. They drove straight to the hospital, but it was too late: Murtaza was already dead.
When Benazir arrived to attend her brother’s funeral in Larkana, angry crowds stoned her limo. She had to retreat. In another unusual display of emotion, local people encouraged Murtaza’s widow to attend the actual burial ceremony in defiance of Islamic tradition. According to Fatima, one of Benazir’s hangers-on instigated legal proceedings against Ghinwa in a religious court for breaching Islamic law. Nothing was sacred.
Anyone who’d witnessed Murtaza’s murder was arrested; one witness died in prison. When Fatima rang Benazir to ask why witnesses were being arrested and not the killers, she was told, “Look, you’re very young. You don’t understand things.” Perhaps for this reason the kind aunt decided to encourage Fatima’s blood mother, Fauzia, whom she had previously denounced as a murderer in the pay of General Zia, to come to Pakistan and claim custody of Fatima. No mystery as to who paid her fare from California. Fatima and Ghinwa Bhutto resisted and the attempt failed. Benazir then tried a softer approach and insisted that Fatima accompany her to New York, where she was going to address the UN Assembly. Ghinwa Bhutto approached friends in Damascus and had her two children flown out of the country. Fatima later discovered that Fauzia had been seen hobnobbing with Benazir in New York.
In November 1996 Benazir was once again removed from power, this time by her own president, Farooq Leghari, a PPP stalwart. He cited corruption, but what had also angered him was the ISI’s crude attempt at blackmail—the intelligence agencies had photographed Leghari’s daughter meeting a boyfriend and threatened to go public. The week Benazir fell, the chief minister of Sind, Abdullah Shah, who had helped organize Murtaza’s murder, hopped on a motorboat and fled Karachi for the Gulf and then to the United States.
A judicial tribunal had been appointed by Benazir’s government to inquire into the circumstances leading to Murtaza’s death. Headed by a Supreme Court judge, it took detailed evidence from all parties. Murtaza’s lawyers accused Zardari, Abdullah Shah, and two senior police officials of conspiracy to murder. Benazir (now out of power) accepted that there had been a conspiracy, but suggested that “the hidden hand responsible for this was President Farooq Ahmad Leghari.” The intention, she said, was to “kill a Bhutto to get rid of a Bhutto.” Nobody took this seriously. Given all that had happened, it was an incredible suggestion.
The tribunal said no legally acceptable evidence linked Zardari to the incident, but asserted, “This was a case of extra-judicial killings by the police
,” and concluded that such an incident could not have taken place without approval from the highest quarters. Nothing happened. Eleven years later, Fatima Bhutto publicly accused Zardari; she also claimed that many of those involved that day appear to have been rewarded for their actions. In an interview on an independent TV station just before the emergency was imposed, Benazir was asked to explain how her brother had bled to death outside his home while she was prime minister. She walked out of the studio.
A sharp op-ed piece by Fatima Bhutto appeared in the Los Angeles Times on November 14, 2007. She did not mince words:
Ms. Bhutto’s political posturing is sheer pantomime. Her negotiations with the military and her unseemly willingness until just a few days ago to take part in Musharraf’s regime have signaled once and for all to the growing legions of fundamentalists across South Asia that democracy is just a guise for dictatorship....
My father was Benazir’s younger brother. To this day, her role in his assassination has never been adequately answered, although the tribunal convened after his death under the leadership of three respected judges concluded that it could not have taken place without approval from a “much higher” political authority....
I have personal reasons to fear the danger that Ms. Bhutto’s presence in Pakistan brings, but I am not alone. The Islamists are waiting at the gate. They have been waiting for confirmation that the reforms for which the Pakistani people have been struggling have been a farce, propped up by the White House. Since Musharraf seized power in 1999, there has been an earnest grass-roots movement for democratic reform. The last thing we need is to be tied to a neocon agenda through a puppet “democrat” like Ms. Bhutto.
This elicited the following response from its target: “My niece is angry with me.” Well, yes.
Musharraf may have withdrawn the corruption charges against Benazir, but three other cases were proceeding in Switzerland, Spain, and Britain. The latter two appear to have been dropped, but the Swiss court is refusing to close the case.
In July 2003, after an investigation lasting several years, Daniel Devaud, a Geneva magistrate, convicted Mr. and Mrs. Asif Ali Zardari, in absentia, of money laundering. They had accepted $15 million in bribes from two Swiss companies, SGS and Cotecna. The couple were sentenced to six months in prison and ordered to return $11.9 million to the government of Pakistan. “I certainly don’t have any doubts about the judgments I handed down,” Devaud told the BBC. Benazir appealed, thus forcing a new investigation. On September 19, 2005, she appeared in a Geneva court and tried to detach herself from the rest of the family. She hadn’t been involved, she said: it was a matter for her husband and her mother, who was afflicted with Alzheimer’s. She knew nothing of the accounts. And what of the agreement her agent Jens Schlegelmilch had signed according to which, in case of her and Zardari’s death, the assets of Bomer Finance Company would be divvied out equally between the Zardari and Bhutto families? She knew nothing of that either. And the £120,000 diamond necklace in the bank vault paid for by Zardari? It was intended for her, but she had rejected the gift as “inappropriate.” The case is still pending. In November 2007, Musharraf told Owen Bennett-Jones of the BBC World Service that his government would not interfere with the proceedings: “That’s up to the Swiss government. Depends on them. It’s a case in their courts.”
In Britain the legal shenanigans concerned the $3.4 million Rockwood estate in Surrey, bought by offshore companies on behalf of Zardari in 1995 and refurbished to his exacting tastes. Zardari denied owning the estate. Then, when the court was about to instruct the liquidators to sell it and return the proceeds to the Pakistani government, Zardari came forward and accepted ownership. In 2006, Lord Justice Collins had ruled that, while he was not making any “findings of fact,” there was a “reasonable prospect” that the Pakistani government might be able to establish that Rockwood had been bought and furnished with “the fruits of corruption.” A close friend of Benazir Bhutto’s informed me that she was genuinely not involved in this one, since Zardari wasn’t thinking of spending much time there with her.
Even these fragments of the past emerged only fleetingly and rarely on television. What was interesting was the short memory of the U.S. press. In 1998, the New York Times had published a sharp and lengthy indictment of Bhutto-Zardari corruption. John F. Burns described how “Asif Ali Zardari turned his marriage to Ms. Bhutto into a source of virtually unchallengeable power” and went on to cite several cases of corruption. The first involved a gold bullion dealer in Dubai who had paid $10 million into one of Zardari’s accounts in return for being awarded the monopoly on gold imports that were vital to Pakistan’s jewelry industry. Two other cases involved France and, again, Switzerland:
In 1995, a leading French military contractor, Dassault Aviation, agreed to pay Mr. Zardari and a Pakistani partner $200 million for a $4 billion jet fighter deal that fell apart only when Ms. Bhutto’s Government was dismissed. In another deal, a leading Swiss company hired to curb customs fraud in Pakistan paid millions of dollars between 1994 and 1996 to offshore companies controlled by Mr. Zardari and Ms. Bhutto’s widowed mother, Nusrat....
In 1994 and 1995, [Zardari] used a Swiss bank account and an American Express card to buy jewelry worth $660,000—including $246,000 at Cartier and Bulgari Corp. in Beverly Hills, Calif., in barely a month.*
Given the scale of the corruption, why was Washington so desperate? Daniel Markey, formerly of the State Department and currently senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, explained why the United States had pushed the marriage of convenience: “A progressive, reform-minded, more cosmopolitan party in government would help the U.S.” As their finances revealed, the Zardaris were certainly cosmopolitan.
What then is at stake in Pakistan as far as Washington is concerned? “The concern I have,” Robert Gates, the U.S. secretary for defense, told the world, “is that the longer the internal problems continue, the more distracted the Pakistani army and security services will be in terms of the internal situation rather than focusing on the terrorist threat in the frontier area.” But one reason for the internal crisis has been Washington’s overreliance on Musharraf and the Pakistani military. Washington’s support and funding have given him the confidence to operate as he pleases. But the thoughtless Western military occupation of Afghanistan is obviously crucial, since the instability in Kabul seeps into Peshawar and the tribal areas between the two countries. The state of emergency targeted the judiciary, opposition politicians, and the independent media. All three groups were, in different ways, challenging the official line on Afghanistan and the “war on terror,” the disappearance of political prisoners, and the widespread use of torture in Pakistani prisons. The issues were being debated on television in a much more open fashion than happens anywhere in the West, where a blanket consensus on Afghanistan drowns all dissent. Musharraf argued that civil society was hampering the war on terror. Hence the emergency. It’s nonsense, of course. It’s the war in the frontier regions that is creating dissent inside the army. Many do not want to fight. Hence the surrender of dozens of soldiers to Taliban guerrillas. This is the reason many junior officers are taking early retirement.
Western pundits blather on about the jihadi finger on the nuclear trigger. This is pure fantasy, reminiscent of a similar campaign almost three decades ago, when the threat wasn’t the jihadis who were fighting alongside the West in Afghanistan, but nationalist military radicals. The cover story of Time magazine for June 15, 1979, dealt with Pakistan; a senior Western diplomat was quoted as saying that the big danger was “that there is another Gadhafi down there, some radical major or colonel in the Pakistani army. We could wake up and find him in Zia’s place one morning and, believe me, Pakistan wouldn’t be the only place that would be destabilized.”
The Pakistan army is half a million strong. Its tentacles are everywhere: land, industry, public utilities, and so on. It would require a cataclysmic upheaval (a U.S. invasion
and occupation, for example) for this army to feel threatened by a jihadi uprising. Two considerations unite senior officers: the unity of the organization and keeping politicians at bay. One reason is the fear that they might lose the comforts and privileges they have acquired after decades of rule; but they also have the deep aversion to democracy that is the hallmark of most armies. Unused to accountability within their own ranks, it’s difficult for them to accept it in society at large.
As southern Afghanistan collapses into chaos, and as corruption and massive inflation take hold, the Taliban are gaining more and more recruits. The generals who once convinced Benazir that control of Kabul via the Taliban would give them “strategic depth” may have retired, but their successors know that the Afghans will not tolerate a long-term Western occupation. They hope for the return of a whitewashed Taliban. Instead of encouraging a regional solution that includes India, Iran, and Russia, the United States would prefer to see the Pakistan army as its permanent cop in Kabul. It won’t work. In Pakistan itself the long night continues as the cycle restarts: military leadership promising reforms degenerates into tyranny, politicians promising social support to the people degenerate into oligarchs. Given that a better functioning neighbor is unlikely to intervene, Pakistan will oscillate between these two forms of rule for the foreseeable future. The people, who feel they have tried everything and failed, will return to a state of semisleep, unless something unpredictable rouses them again. This is always possible.
Before the story could move further, another tragedy struck Pakistan and the House of Bhutto. Determined to fulfill her part of the Faustian deal brokered in Washington, Benazir Bhutto, despite some hesitation, agreed to participate in an election regarded at the time as deeply flawed by virtually every independent commentator in Pakistan and by many in her own party.