The Duel (29 page)

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 extremists 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.
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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).

Social and political rank in much of today’s world is determined by wealth. Power and money cohabit the same space. The result is a mutant democracy whose function is to seal off all possibilities of redistributing wealth and power or enhancing its own standing with the citizenry. Some exceptions remain. In China, for instance, the party hierarchy remains dominant, a partial reflection, perhaps, of the ancient mandarin tradition that insisted on educational qualifications as the principal criteria for social advancement. In Pakistan, the brightest kids dream of becoming stockbrokers in New York; the most ambitious imagine themselves in uniform. The immeasurable importance of the army determines the entire political culture of the country. The chief of staff is the single person on whom the gaze of the political community in Pakistan rests semipermanently. Next in line of importance is the U.S. ambassador. A failure to grasp this basic reality makes it genuinely difficult to understand the past or present of the country.

Throughout its sixty-year history, political life in Pakistan has been dominated by a series of clashes between general and politician, with civilian bureaucrats pretending to be impartial seconds, while mostly favoring the military. The final arbiter is usually Washington. The statistics reveal the winner. Bureaucrats and unelected politicians ran Pakistan for eleven years, the army has ruled the country for thirty-four years, and elected representatives have been in power for fifteen years. It is a dismal record, but it had Washington’s strong approval as revealed by an inspection of each of the dictatorships in turn.

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nounced, among other things, that the Musharraf government was the best if not the only hope for long-term stability in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The turbulence required a strongman, and as long as Pakistan was on board in the “war against terror” and prepared to fight the forces of extremism, the United States owed long-term and comprehensive support to a regime committed to “enlightened moderation.”

The word association forces me to digress briefly and recall the late conservative senator Barry Goldwater’s dictum in his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 1964: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Malcolm X defended this view eloquently in one of his last public appearances, at which I was present. Leaving aside important differences of how to interpret “liberty,” this is also the view today of many who resist the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, though unfortunately most of them would not agree with a 1981 assessment by the same senator during a Senate speech in which he offered sage advice to his own party that applied equally to the Washington-backed Afghan insurgents battling the godless Russians at the time:

On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position one hundred percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both.

I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of “conservatism.”