Bhutto’s ‘Reconciliation’ fascinating, frustrating
“Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West”
by Benazir Bhutto (Harper, 328 pages, $27.95)
There’s a Shakespearean quality to the late Benazir Bhutto’s life, but if you scour the Bard’s tragedies for an appropriate epitaph, the mind tends to settle on: “Nothing is, but what is not.”
It’s no accident that the most ambivalent – indeed, sinister – line from “Macbeth” commends itself. The play is, after all, one of the canon’s greatest tales of impacted ambition, betrayal and convoluted deceit.
It is, in other words, rather like the political history of wretched Pakistan, which, according to Bhutto, “today is the most dangerous place in the world,” not least because it is both unstable and nuclear-armed.
Bhutto was twice her country’s prime minister (1988-1990 and 1993-1996) and had returned from involuntary exile to campaign for a third term when she was assassinated in December by Islamic extremists.
“Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West” was finished just two days before the Harvard- and Oxford-educated Bhutto, 55, was killed.
Like the woman who wrote it, the book is alternately fascinating, frustrating and opaque in a dodgy sort of way.
In part, it’s a story of Bhutto’s return and the campaign that followed. In part, it’s a fragmentary account of her years preparing for and exercising power in a tumultuous Muslim state.
Bhutto’s account of these events is, at best, fragmentary and selective.
She campaigned – and presents herself in “Reconciliation” – as a modernizing, reasonably secular democrat, and so she was. However, she also was prime minister when fateful connections were made between Pakistan’s powerful, shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence group and the militantly fundamentalist Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam and the Afghan Taliban.
Over the years, Bhutto told various stories about her role in the decision to link Pakistani military and intelligence policies to militant Islam. As a Western-educated female leader, she was anathema to her military’s new clients – indeed, they would one day kill her – but the degree of her enthusiasm for the connections at their inception remains unclear.
Bhutto’s record is strewn with such ambiguities. She was, by her own words – and many of her actions – a convinced democrat with a populist bent for grass-roots development. Yet she came from a vast, aristocratic family that still holds actual – not virtual – feudal sway over large parts of Sindh province.
She inherited leadership of her Pakistan Peoples Party as a legacy from her father – Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who also was a “populist” prime minister and was executed by the general who overthrew him – and her will specified that her mantle was to pass to her husband.
He since has stepped aside in favor of their son, 19-year-old Bilawal, currently at Oxford. Most democratic parties don’t work quite that way.
Bhutto’s commitment to education and development is well documented, yet corruption was a factor both times she was forced from office. Her husband earned the nickname “Mr. Ten Percent.”
The most interesting part of Bhutto’s book is her argument with Samuel Huntington and the rest of the “Clash of Civilizations” crowd, who said that a confrontation between the West and militant Islam was inevitable after the Cold War was resolved.
Historical inevitability always is a dicey prospect, but Bhutto goes well beyond the typical responses by Muslim political leaders. She argues that a substantial part of the work to be done to avoid such a clash must occur in the Islamic world, where a case needs to be made forcefully for more tolerant strains of Islam that are friendly to modernism and civil society.
It says something about the state of affairs in the Islamic world that this is a daring, even singular, position for a political leader to take.