by Ali, Tariq
She decided to begin her campaign in the country’s military capital, Rawalpindi, where she arrived on December 27, 2007. She came to address a public meeting at Liaquat Bagh (formerly Municipal Park), a popular public space named after the country’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was killed there by an assassin in October 1951. The killer, Said Akbar, was immediately shot dead on the orders of a police officer involved in the plot. Not far from here, a colonial structure where nationalists were imprisoned once stood. This was Rawalpindi jail. Here, Benazir’s father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in April 1979. The military tyrant responsible for his judicial murder made sure the site of the tragedy was destroyed as well.
The rally was not disrupted on this occasion, but the killers were waiting in the vicinity of her car. As she was about to leave, she decided on a last wave to her supporters and the television cameras. A bomb blew up and she appeared to have been felled by bullets fired at her car. The assassins, mindful of their failure in Karachi a month previously, had taken out double insurance this time. They wanted her dead at any cost. Government pathologists claimed that Bhutto caught her head on the sunroof of the car she was speaking from as she ducked inside, fracturing her skull, and that was the cause of her death. Her party disagreed. Scotland Yard was asked for help. After a brief investigation it concurred with the government report. Exhuming the body and a new postmortem would have been definitive, but Zardari refused to permit it.
Her death was greeted with anger throughout the country. The people of her home province, Sind, responded with violent demonstrations, targeting government buildings and cars of non-Sindhis. While the global media networks assumed, without any investigation, that she was killed by local jihadi terrorists or Al Qaeda, the crowds in Pakistan had different ideas and pointed accusing fingers at the president, while the streets resounded to chants of Peoples Party supporters: “Amreeka ne kutta paala, vardi wallah, vardi wallah” (“America trained a dog / the one in uniform, the one in uniform”).
Even those sharply critical of Benazir Bhutto’s behavior and policies—both while she was in office and more recently—were stunned and angered by her death. Indignation and fear stalked the country once again. This event made a crude rigging of the February 2008 elections virtually impossible. An odd coexistence of military despotism and anarchy created the conditions leading to her assassination. In the past, military rule was designed to preserve order—and did so for a few years. No longer. Today it creates disorder and promotes lawlessness. How else can one explain the sacking of the chief justice and other judges of the country’s Supreme Court for attempting to hold the government’s intelligence agencies and the police accountable to courts of law? Their replacements lack the backbone to do anything, let alone conduct a proper inquest into the misdeeds of the agencies to uncover the truth behind the carefully organized killing of a major political leader. Pakistan today is a conflagration of despair. It is assumed that the killers were jihadi fanatics. This may well be true, but were they acting on their own? Conspiracy theories mushroomed after her death. General Hamid Gul, a former director general of the ISI during Benazir’s first prime ministership, told the media that despite promising the United States that she would hand over A. Q. Khan, the self-styled “father of the Pakistani bomb,” for questioning and permit the entry of U.S. troops and planes to deal with Al Qaeda in Pakistan, she had “drifted from her agenda” after her arrival and the first attempt on her life. Hamid Gul insisted that “the Israeli lobby will never rest in peace until they have snatched our nuclear weapons. In the war against terror, Pakistan is the target.” For this, according to General Gul, she was eliminated. This is a popular view among retired segments of the military and civilian bureaucracy, but is it credible?
It is certainly the case that Musharraf refused to send A. Q. Khan to Washington. Government officials told me that the United States was desperate to question Khan about his dealings with Iran, and what he said under questioning in the United States might be used as a pretext to bomb Iran’s nuclear reactors. If Benazir Bhutto had agreed to this, which is possible, nothing suggests that she had undergone any political conversion after her return. She had hitched her future to the United States for a number of reasons. They would help whitewash her past and get her back into power, after which she would still need Washington’s support to deal with the army. The United States as the sole imperial power was too powerful to oppose anyway, and those, like her late father, who did not do its bidding had ended up dead. For these reasons she had decided on a historic compromise and promised a rapid recognition of Israel as well, to appease Washington. This explains the unusual Israeli media coverage of her death as a “massive loss” and several full-page advertisements in the New York Times and other newspapers by a Los Angeles–based pro-Israeli organization, the Simon Wiesenthal Center. A large picture of Bhutto was beneath the words “SUICIDE TERROR: What more will it take for the world to act?” and the ad called on the United Nations for a special session devoted to the issue. “Unless we put suicide bombing on the top of the international community’s agenda, this virulent cancer could engulf us all,” it reads. “The looming threat of WMDs in the hands of suicide bombers will dwarf the casualties already suffered in 30 countries.” The ad demanded that the UN declare suicide bombings a “crime against humanity.”
Benazir, according to some close to her, had been tempted to boycott the Pakistani elections, but had lacked the political courage to defy Washington, which was insisting that the elections go ahead as scheduled. She certainly had plenty of physical courage and had refused to be cowed by threats from local opponents. She chose to address an election rally in Liaquat Bagh. Her death further poisoned relations between the Pakistan Peoples Party and the army. That had started in 1977 when her father was removed by a military dictator and killed. Party activists, particularly in the province of Sind, were brutally tortured, humiliated, and, sometimes, disappeared or killed.
Pakistan’s turbulent history, a result of continuous military rule and unpopular global alliances, confronts the ruling elite now with serious choices. They appear to have no positive aims. The overwhelming majority of the country disapproves of the government’s foreign policy. They are angered by its lack of a serious domestic policy except for further enriching a callous and greedy elite that includes a swollen, parasitic military. Now they watch helplessly as politicians are shot dead in front of them.
I FIRST MET Benazir at her father’s house in Clifton, Karachi, in 1969, when she was a fun-loving teenager, and eight years later at Oxford, when she invited me to speak at the Oxford Union when she was its president. At that time she was not particularly interested in politics and told me she had always wanted to be a diplomat. History and personal tragedy pushed her in another direction. Her father’s death transformed her. She became a new person, determined to take on the military dictator of that time. We would endlessly discuss the future of the country in her tiny flat in London. She agreed that land reforms, mass education programs, a health service, and an independent foreign policy were constructive aims and crucial if the country was to be saved from the vultures in and out of uniform. Her constituency was the poor, and she was proud of that.
I was in regular communication with political activists and intellectuals in Lahore. Their virtually unanimous view was that since her return would be the first occasion for people to publicly mourn the execution of her father, at least half a million would come out to greet her. Having experienced firsthand the terrors of the Zia dictatorship, she was less sure about the turnout, and who can blame her. The country had been silenced by repression, but my instincts were the same as those of friends in Lahore. She asked me to write her speech. One day she rang. “Last night I dreamt I’d arrived in Lahore, the crowds were there, I went to the podium, opened my handbag, but the speech was missing. Can’t you hurry up?” I did, and then we rehearsed it once a week before she left. Her Urdu was rudimentary, but when I suggested that s
he ask the assembled masses a question in Punjabi, she balked at the thought. The question was simple: “Zia rehvay ya jahvay?” (Should Zia stay or go?). Her pronunciation was abysmal. She would laugh and try again till it became as good as it was ever going to be. There was another moment of panic. “What should I do if they reply he should stay.” This time I laughed. “They wouldn’t be there if they felt that.” Film footage shows her asking the question in Punjabi, and the affecting response of the crowd, which turned out to be closer to a million people strong. That campaign was the high point of her life, when a combination of political and physical courage created a wave of hope in the benighted country.
She changed again after becoming prime minister. In the early days, when I met her on a number of occasions in Islamabad, we would gently argue. In response to my numerous complaints, all she would say was that the world had changed. She couldn’t be on the “wrong side” of history. And so, like many others, she made her peace with Washington. This finally led to the deal with Musharraf and her return home after more than a decade in exile. On a number of occasions she told me that she did not fear death. It was one of the dangers of playing politics in Pakistan. The last time we met was in the prime minister’s residence in 1995, a year before she was dismissed from office for corruption. I asked whether she was worried by the threat of assassination. There had been an attempt already, she informed me, but the assassin, Aimal Kansi, almost blew himself up, but escaped. She smiled. I was astonished by the revelation.
Kansi was a former CIA agent recruited during the first Afghan war. He felt betrayed by the agency when they cut off his salary after the Russians left Afghanistan. His subsequent behavior resembled the script of The Bourne Identity. In 1993, Kansi returned to the United States, made his way to Langley, Virginia, waited with a sniper’s rifle, and unleashed a deadly rampage, killing two CIA employees, including his former boss, and wounding several others. He returned to Pakistan and was on the most wanted list of the CIA and the FBI. In 1997, he was finally captured by FBI agents in a seedy hotel in Islamabad. He had been betrayed by his own bodyguards, the CIA having spent more than $3.5 million to pay informants and others to entrap him. He was extradited to the United States, where he was tried and killed by lethal injection. Till she told me, I had no idea that he had tried to kill her as well.
It is difficult to imagine any good coming out of the tragedy of her death, but there is one possibility. Pakistan desperately needs a political party that can give voice to the social needs of the bulk of the people. The Peoples Party, founded by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, was built by the activists of the only popular mass movement the country has known: students, peasants, and workers who fought for three months in 1968–69 to topple the country’s first military dictator. They saw it as their party, and that feeling persists in some parts of the country to this day, despite everything.
Benazir’s horrific death should have given her colleagues pause for reflection. To be dependent on a person or a family may be necessary at certain times, but it is a structural weakness, not a strength for a political organization. The Peoples Party needed to be refounded as a modern and democratic organization, open to serious debate and discussion, defending social and human rights, uniting the many disparate groups and individuals in Pakistan desperate for any halfway decent alternative, and coming forward with concrete proposals to stabilize occupied and war-torn Afghanistan. The Bhutto family should not have been asked for any more sacrifices. But it was not to be. When emotions run high, reason goes underground, and in Pakistan it can lie buried for a long time.
Six hours before she was executed, Mary, Queen of Scots, wrote to her brother-in-law, Henry III of France: “As for my son, I commend him to you in so far as he deserves, for I cannot answer for him.” The year was 1587. On December 30, 2007, a conclave of feudal potentates gathered in the home of the slain Benazir Bhutto to hear her last will and testament being read out, its contents subsequently announced to the world media. Where Mary was tentative, her modern equivalent left no room for doubt. She could certainly answer for her son.
Her will specified that her nineteen-year-old boy, Bilawal Zardari, a student at Oxford University, should succeed her as chairperson of the party. Her husband, Asif Zardari (one of the most venal and discredited politicians in the country and still facing corruption charges in two European courts), would lead the party till Bilawal came of age. He would then become chairperson for life, as was the custom. That this is now official does not make it any less grotesque. The Peoples Party had now formally become a family heirloom, a property to be disposed of at the will of its proprietor.
Pakistan and the supporters of the party deserved something better than this distasteful, medieval charade. Benazir’s last decision, alas, was in the same autocratic mode as its predecessors, an approach that would tragically cost her . . . her own life. Had she heeded the advice of some party leaders and not agreed to the Washington-brokered deal with Pervez Musharraf or, even later, decided to boycott his parliamentary election without cast-iron guarantees regarding her safety, she might still have been alive.
That most of the PPP inner circle consists of spineless timeservers leading frustrated and melancholy lives is no excuse for the farcical succession. All this could be transformed if inner-party democracy was implemented. A tiny layer of incorruptible and principled politicians are inside the party, but they have been sidelined. Dynastic politics is a sign of weakness, not strength. Benazir was fond of comparing her clan to the Kennedys, but chose to ignore the fact that the Democratic Party is not the instrument of any one family.
The issue of democracy is enormously important in a country that has been governed by the military for over half of its life. Pakistan is not a “failed state” in the sense of the Congo or Rwanda. It is a dysfunctional state and has been for almost four decades.
At the heart of this dysfunction is the domination by the army, and each period of military rule has made things worse. This has prevented the emergence of stable political institutions. Here the United States bears direct responsibility, since it has always regarded the military as the only institution it can do business with and, unfortunately, still does so. This rock has forced choppy waters into a headlong torrent.
The military’s weaknesses are well-known and amply documented. But the politicians are not in a position to cast stones. After all, it was not Musharraf who pioneered the assault on the judiciary so conveniently overlooked by the U.S. deputy secretary of state, John Negroponte, and the British foreign secretary, David Miliband. The first attack on the Supreme Court was mounted by Nawaz Sharif’s goons, who physically assaulted judges because they were angered by a decision that ran counter to their master’s interests when he was prime minister.
Those who had hoped that, with Benazir’s death, the Peoples Party might start a new chapter are likely to be disappointed. Zardari’s ascendancy will almost certainly split the party over the next few years. He was loathed by many activists, who held him responsible for his wife’s downfall. Now he is their leader.
The global consensus that jihadis or Al Qaeda killed Benazir Bhutto fell apart within a fortnight of her murder. It emerged that when Benazir asked the United States for a Karzai-style phalanx of privately contracted former U.S. marine bodyguards, the Pakistan government saw it as a breach of sovereignty and contemptuously rejected the suggestion. Hillary Clinton and Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, publicly hinted that the convict’s badge should be pinned on General Musharraf and not Al Qaeda for the murder, a sure sign that sections of the U.S. establishment were thinking it was time to dump the Pakistani president. He, of course, angrily denied any association with the Bhutto murder and asserted that even if she had survived, she would not have been able to handle the crisis in Pakistan:
The United States thought Benazir was the right person to fight terrorists. Who is the best person to fight? You need three qualities today if you want to fight the extr
emists and the terrorists. Number one, you must have the military with you. Well, she was very unpopular with the military. Very unpopular. Number two, you shouldn’t be seen by the entire religious lobby to be alien—a nonreligious person. The third element: don’t be seen as an extension of the United States. Now I am branded as an extension, but not to the extent she was. Pakistanis know that I can be tough. I can speak out against Hillary Clinton. I can speak out against anyone. These are the elements. You be the judge.*
Washington’s problem is that, with Benazir dead, the only phone number in Islamabad they can call is that of General Ashfaq Kayani, the Fort Leavenworth–trained head of the army. Nawaz Sharif is regarded in Washington as a lightweight and a Saudi poodle (his close business and religious affinities with the kingdom are well-known) and hence not 100 percent reliable, though, given the U.S.-Saudi alliance, poor Sharif is puzzled as to why this should exclude him from consideration. He and his brother are both ready to do Washington’s bidding but would prefer the Saudi king to Musharraf as the imperial messenger.
A temporary solution to the crisis was available. This would have required General Musharraf’s replacement as president by a less contentious figure, an all-party government of unity to prepare the basis for genuine elections within six months, and the reinstatement of the sacked Supreme Court judges to investigate Benazir’s murder without fear or favor. Musharraf has finally discarded his uniform and handed over the military to Kayani. He should simultaneously have retired from political life since it was the uniform that had led him to the presidency. It would have been a new start, but Pakistan’s history is replete with leaders who had no desire to besmirch themselves with new ideas. Politics of the short term is always in command. This turbulent year virtually telescoped the entire history of the country, barring a province on the verge of defection. One of the more depressing features of the Pakistani military-bureaucratic elite—which has governed the country almost continuously since it was founded in 1947—is its startling lack of originality. It regularly repeats old mistakes. Never is this more obvious than during extended periods of direct or indirect military rule (1958–71, 1977–89, 1999–2008).