The West's 'fix' was never in

MARCUS GEE
December 28, 2007

Few world leaders have raised such extravagant expectations as Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto.

Smart, brave, glamorous, she charmed the world when she became the first woman elected prime minister of a Muslim nation at age 35 and charmed it again when she returned from exile this fall to defy death threats and campaign for democracy.

Here, dreamed the outside world, was the woman who might "fix" Pakistan, transforming a chaotic nuclear-armed nation of 160 million into a functioning, progressive Islamic state.

Fond hope. The sad truth is that in two terms as prime minister and a quarter century in the political game, Ms. Bhutto made very little difference to the feudal, often poisonous nature of Pakistani politics.

In fact, in many ways she embodied it.

Her stints as prime minister were marked by the same corruption that seems to cling to every Pakistani regime. Like every leader of Pakistan, she played footsie with Islamic extremists, helping the Taliban's rise to power in neighbouring Afghanistan. And like every civilian leader of Pakistan, she made backroom deals with the all-powerful armed forces, undermining her claims to be a bold crusader against military rule.

Imperious by nature, she ruled her Pakistan Peoples Party like a martinet, inheriting its leadership from her executed father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and calling herself "chairperson for life."

By the time she came back home in October to try for a third go-round, many Pakistanis had soured on her. Pollsters for Washington's International Republican Institute found that just 27 per cent of Pakistanis believed her when she said she was coming back to foster democracy; 47 per cent said she was only trying to "improve her personal situation."

Yet in the West, she was lionized as the Daughter of the East (the title of her 1989 autobiography) who might deliver Pakistan from the twin evils of dictatorship and extremism.

"I know that I am a symbol of what the so-called jihadists, Taliban and al-Qaeda, most fear," she wrote in a new preface to the autobiography last April. "I am a female political leader fighting to bring modernity, communication, education and technology to Pakistan."

That was a message that went down like strawberries and cream in Washington. The United States pressured Pakistan's military-backed strongman, Pervez Musharraf, to let Ms. Bhutto return to Pakistan in April, taking heart when the two negotiated over a possible power-sharing deal.

"She always told us what we wanted to hear," said Marvin Weinbaum, a Pakistan expert at Washington's Middle East Institute, "so we overestimated what she could deliver."

In fact, "There was a serious question about whether she could quell the extremists the way she said she could, or whether she could control the military the way she suggested," he said.

Expectations were piled on Ms. Bhutto at an early age. The eldest of four children, she was favoured by her father, who sent his ambitious daughter to Harvard and Oxford for a political education. In 1976, she was elected president of the renowned Oxford Union debating society, the first Asian woman to hold the post.

"You are my jewel. You always have been," Mr. Bhutto told her from his jail cell on the eve of his execution in 1979 after being convicted of conspiring to murder the father of a dissident, according to her autobiography.

When she returned to Pakistan from exile in London in 1986, hundreds of thousands of supporters cheered her cavalcade, much as they did when she came back again this fall.

When she became prime minister 1½ years later, there were cheers from around the world at the prospect of a young woman with modern views leading a country with the second-largest Muslim population in the world. People magazine named her one of the world's 50 most beautiful people.

But her performance in office - from 1988 to 1990 and from 1993 to 1996 - was disappointing. Despite election promises, she failed to revoke a notorious law that required a woman alleging rape to produce four male witnesses to prove her claim.

Her government racked up billions in foreign debt. Billions more in foreign aid went mysteriously missing.

The world saw her as "an attractive, classy lady," said Mr. Weinbaum, but "she demonstrated very little skill in terms of competent administration."

She was often intolerant of dissent, bypassing parliament, ruling by edict, packing the courts with friendly judges and setting the police on opponents.

"She showed she was capable of great violence," her niece Fatima Bhutto said in a recent interview. "Her last government was marked by assassination squads and torture cells."

Fatima has been a critic of her aunt since her father Murtaza, Ms. Bhutto's brother, was shot dead by police while she was prime minister in 1996. A second brother, Shahnawaz, was found dead in his apartment in France in 1985.

Worse than the intolerance was the corruption. Ms. Bhutto had the cheek to name her own husband, Asif Ali Zardari, minister of investment, a post he was accused of using to line his own pockets. He was jailed for eight years on corruption charges.

A Swiss court found Ms. Bhutto guilty of money laundering in 2003, a case, like several others, still dragging through the courts.

Ms. Bhutto, who saw both of her governments dismissed for corruption, incompetence and nepotism, denied all the claims against her. Mr. Musharraf arranged to give her amnesty when she came home this fall as part of an I'll-scratch-your-back, you-scratch-mine political deal.

That deal, supported by the United States, further tarnished Ms. Bhutto's reputation. Supporters said she was condemning military rule while colluding with the ruler.

No one questions that Ms. Bhutto showed great courage in the final act of her life. She insisted on addressing rallies and campaigning in public over the past three months, even after the deadly bombing that greeted her return in October. She knew the risks and spoke of the price that Martin Luther King and Benigno Aquino of the Philippines had paid in the struggle for liberty.

"Too many people have sacrificed too much, too many have died and too many people see me as their remaining hope for liberty for me to stop fighting now," she wrote earlier this year as she planned her return from exile.

Articulate, charismatic, determined, Ms. Bhutto was a brilliant spokeswoman for the dream of a more liberal, more stable Pakistan.

The tragedy is that she managed to do so little to achieve it.