[DEBATE] : Daughter of the West: Tariq Aziz on Benazir Bhutto

[MFleshman at aol.com]

London Reviw of Books
13 December 2007
 
Daughter of the West
Tariq Ali 
Arranged marriages can be a messy business. Designed principally as a means  
of accumulating wealth, circumventing undesirable flirtations or transcending  
clandestine love affairs, they often don’t work. Where both parties are known 
to  loathe each other, only a rash parent, desensitised by the thought of 
short-term  gain, will continue with the process knowing full well that it will 
end in  misery and possibly violence. That this is equally true in political 
life became  clear in the recent attempt by Washington to tie Benazir Bhutto to 
Pervez  Musharraf. 
The single, strong parent in this case was a desperate State Department –  
with John Negroponte as the ghoulish go-between and Gordon Brown as the blushing 
 bridesmaid – fearful that if it did not push this through both parties might 
 soon be too old for recycling. The bride was certainly in a hurry, the groom 
 less so. Brokers from both sides engaged in lengthy negotiations on the size 
of  the dowry. Her broker was and remains Rehman Malik, a former boss of 
Pakistan’s  FIA, who has been investigated for corruption by the National 
Accountability  Bureau and who served nearly a year in prison after Benazir’s fall, 
then became  one of her business partners and is currently under investigation 
(with her) by  a Spanish court looking into a company called Petroline FZC, 
which made  questionable payments to Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Documents, if 
genuine, show  that she chaired the company. She may have been in a hurry but she 
did not wish  to be seen taking the arm of a uniformed president. He was not 
prepared to  forgive her past. The couple’s distaste for each other yielded to 
a mutual  dependence on the United States. Neither party could say ‘no’, 
though Musharraf  hoped the union could be effected inconspicuously. Fat chance. 
Both parties made concessions. She agreed that he could take off his uniform  
after his ‘re-election’ by Parliament, but it had to be before the next 
general  election. (He has now done this, leaving himself dependent on the 
goodwill of  his successor as army chief of staff.) He pushed through a legal ruling –
 yet  another sordid first in the country’s history – known as the National  
Reconciliation Ordinance, which withdrew all cases of corruption pending 
against  politicians accused of looting the national treasury. The ruling was 
crucial for  her since she hoped that the money-laundering and corruption cases 
pending in  three European courts – in Valencia, Geneva and London – would now 
be dismissed.  This doesn’t seem to have happened. 
Many Pakistanis – not just the mutinous and mischievous types who have to be  
locked up at regular intervals – were repelled, and coverage of ‘the deal’ 
in  the Pakistan media was universally hostile, except on state television. The 
 ‘breakthrough’ was loudly trumpeted in the West, however, and a whitewashed 
 Benazir Bhutto was presented on US networks and BBC TV news as the champion 
of  Pakistani democracy – reporters loyally referred to her as ‘the former 
prime  minister’ rather than the fugitive politician facing corruption charges 
in  several countries. 
She had returned the favour in advance by expressing sympathy for the US wars 
 in Iraq and Afghanistan, lunching with the Israeli ambassador to the UN (a  
litmus test) and pledging to ‘wipe out terrorism’ in her own country. In 1979 
a  previous military dictator had bumped off her father with Washington’s 
approval,  and perhaps she thought it would be safer to seek permanent shelter 
underneath  the imperial umbrella. HarperCollins had paid her half a million 
dollars to  write a new book. The working title she chose was ‘Reconciliation’. 
As for the general, he had begun his period in office in 1999 by bowing to  
the spirit of the age and titling himself ‘chief executive’ rather than ‘chief 
 martial law administrator’, which had been the norm. Like his predecessors, 
he  promised he would stay in power only for a limited period, pledging in 
2003 to  resign as army chief of staff in 2004. Like his predecessors, he ignored 
his  pledge. Martial law always begins with the promise of a new order that 
will  sweep away the filth and corruption that marked the old one: in this case 
it  toppled the civilian administrations of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. 
But  ‘new orders’ are not forward movements, more military detours that 
further  weaken the shaky foundations of a country and its institutions. Within a 
decade  the uniformed ruler will be overtaken by a new upheaval. 
Dreaming of her glory days in the last century, Benazir wanted a large  
reception on her return. The general was unhappy. The intelligence agencies (as  
well as her own security advisers) warned her of the dangers. She had declared  
war on the terrorists and they had threatened to kill her. But she was 
adamant.  She wanted to demonstrate her popularity to the world and to her political  
rivals, including those inside her own fiefdom, the Pakistan People’s Party  
(PPP). For a whole month before she boarded the Dubai-Karachi flight, the PPP  
were busy recruiting volunteers from all over the country to welcome her. Up 
to  200,000 people lined the streets, but it was a far cry from the million 
who  turned up in Lahore in 1986 when a very different Benazir returned to 
challenge  General Zia ul-Haq. The plan had been to move slowly in the Bhuttomobile 
from  Karachi airport to the tomb of the country’s founder, Muhammad Ali 
Jinnah, where  she would make a speech. It was not to be. As darkness fell, the 
bombers struck.  Who they were and who sent them remains a mystery. She was 
unhurt, but 130  people died, including some of the policemen guarding her. The 
wedding reception  had led to mayhem. 
The general, while promising to collaborate with Benazir, was coolly making  
arrangements to prolong his own stay at President’s House. Even before her  
arrival he had considered taking drastic action to dodge the obstacles that  
stood in his way, but his generals (and the US Embassy) seemed unconvinced. The  
bombing of Benazir’s cavalcade reopened the debate. Pakistan, if not exactly 
the  erupting volcano portrayed in the Western media, was being shaken by all 
sorts  of explosions. The legal profession, up in arms at Musharraf’s recent 
dismissal  of the chief justice, had won a temporary victory, resulting in a 
fiercely  independent Supreme Court. The independent TV networks continued to 
broadcast  reports that challenged official propaganda. Investigative journalism 
is never  popular with governments and the general often contrasted the 
deference with  which he was treated by the US networks and BBC television with the ‘
unruly’  questioning inflicted on him by local journalists: it ‘misled the 
people’. He  had become obsessed with the media coverage of the lawyers’ 
revolt. A decline in  his popularity increased the paranoia. His advisers were 
people he had promoted.  Generals who had expressed divergent opinions in ‘frank 
and informal  get-togethers’ had been retired. His political allies were 
worried that their  opportunities to enrich themselves even further would be 
curtailed if they had  to share power with Benazir. 
What if the Supreme Court were now to declare his re-election by a dying and  
unrepresentative assembly illegal? To ward off disaster, the ISI had been  
preparing blackmail flicks: agents secretly filmed some of the Supreme Court  
judges in flagrante. But so unpopular had Musharraf become that even the sight  
of judicial venerables in bed might not have done the trick. It might even 
have  increased their support. (In 1968, when a right-wing, pro-military rag in 
Lahore  published an attack on me, it revealed that I ‘had attended sex orgies 
in a  French country house organised by [my] friend, the Jew Cohn-Bendit. All 
the  fifty women in the swimming-pool were Jewish.’ Alas, this was totally 
false, but  my parents were amazed at the number of people who congratulated them 
on my  virility.) Musharraf decided that blackmail wasn’t worth the risk. 
Only firm  action could ‘restore order’ – i.e. save his skin. The usual 
treatment in these  cases is a declaration of martial law. But what if the country is 
already being  governed by the army chief of staff? The solution is simple. 
Treble the dose.  Organise a coup within a coup. That is what Musharraf decided 
to do. Washington  was informed a few weeks in advance, Downing Street 
somewhat later. Benazir’s  patrons in the West told her what was about to happen and 
she, foolishly for a  political leader who has just returned to her country, 
evacuated to Dubai. 
On 3 November Musharraf, as chief of the army, suspended the 1973  
constitution and imposed a state of emergency: all non-government TV channels  were 
taken off the air, the mobile phone networks were jammed, paramilitary  units 
surrounded the Supreme Court. The chief justice convened an emergency  bench of 
judges, who – heroically – declared the new dispensation ‘illegal and  
unconstitutional’. They were unceremoniously removed and put under house arrest.  
Pakistan’s judges have usually been acquiescent. Those who in the past resisted  
military leaders were soon bullied out of it, so the decision of this chief  
justice took the country by surprise and won him great admiration. Global media  
coverage of Pakistan suggests a country of generals, corrupt politicians and  
bearded lunatics: the struggle to reinstate the chief justice had presented a 
 different picture. 
Aitzaz Ahsan, a prominent member of the PPP, minister of the interior in  
Benazir’s first government and currently president of the Bar Association, was  
arrested and placed in solitary confinement. Several thousand political and  
civil rights activists were picked up. Imran Khan, a fierce and incorruptible  
opponent of the regime, was arrested, charged with ‘state terrorism’ – for 
which  the penalty is death or life imprisonment – and taken in handcuffs to a 
remote  high-security prison. Musharraf, Khan argued, had begun yet another 
shabby  chapter in Pakistan’s history. 
Lawyers were arrested all over the country; many were physically attacked by  
policemen. Humiliate them was the order, and the police obliged. A lawyer,  ‘
Omar’, circulated an account of what happened: 
While I was standing talking to my colleagues, we saw the police go wild on  
the orders of a superior officer. In riot gear . . . brandishing  weapons and 
sticks, about a hundred policemen attacked us . . . and  seemed intensely 
happy at doing so. We all ran. 
Some of us who were not as nimble on their feet as others were caught by the  
police and beaten mercilessly. We were then locked in police vans used to  
transport convicted prisoners. Everyone was stunned at this show of brute force  
but it did not end. The police went on mayhem inside the court premises and  
court buildings . . . Those of us who were arrested were taken to  various 
police stations and put in lockups. At midnight, we were told that we  were being 
shifted to jail. We could not get bail as our fundamental rights were  
suspended. Sixty lawyers were put into a police van ten feet by four feet wide  and 
five feet in height. We were squashed like sardines. When the van reached  the 
jail, we were told that we could not get [out] until orders of our detention  
were received by the jail authorities. Our older colleagues started to  
suffocate, some fainted, others started to panic because of claustrophobia. The  
police ignored our screams and refused to open the van doors. Finally, after  
three hours . . . we were let out and taken to mosquito-infected  barracks where 
the food given to us smelled like sewage water. 
Geo, the largest TV network, had long since located its broadcasting  
facilities in Dubai. It was a strange sensation watching the network in London  when 
the screens were blank in Pakistan. On the very first day of the emergency  I 
saw Hamid Mir, a journalist loathed by the general, reporting from Islamabad  
and asserting that the US Embassy had given the green light to the coup 
because  it regarded the chief justice as a nuisance and wrongly believed him to be ‘
a  Taliban sympathiser’. Certainly no US spokesperson or State Department 
adjunct  in the Foreign Office criticised the dismissal of the eight Supreme 
Court judges  or their arrest: that was the quid pro quo for Washington’s 
insistence that  Musharraf take off his uniform. If he was going to turn civilian he 
wanted all  the other rules twisted in his favour. A newly appointed stooge 
Supreme Court  would soon help him with the rule-bending. As would the 
authorities in Dubai,  who suspended Geo’s facilities. 
In the evening of that first day, and after several delays, a flustered  
General Musharraf, his hair badly dyed, appeared on TV, trying to look like the  
sort of leader who wants it understood that the political crisis is to be  
discussed with gravity and sangfroid. Instead, he came across as a dumbed down  
dictator fearful for his own political future. His performance as he broadcast  
to the nation, first in Urdu and then in English, was incoherent. The gist was 
 simple: he had to act because the Supreme Court had ‘so demoralised our 
state  agencies that we can’t fight the “war on terror”’ and the TV networks had 
become  ‘totally irresponsible’. ‘I have imposed emergency,’ he said 
halfway through his  diatribe, adding, with a contemptuous gesture: ‘You must have 
seen it on TV.’  Was he being sarcastic, given that most channels had been shut 
down? Who knows?  Mohammed Hanif, the sharp-witted head of the BBC’s Urdu 
Service, which monitored  the broadcast, confessed himself flummoxed when he 
wrote up what he heard. He  had no doubt that the Urdu version of the speech was 
the general’s own work.  Hanif’s deconstruction – he quoted the general in 
Urdu and in English – deserved  a broadcast all of its own: 
Here are some random things he said. And trust me, these things were said  
quite randomly. Yes, he did say: ‘Extremism bahut extreme ho gaya hai  
[extremism has become too extreme] . . . Nobody is scared of us  anymore . . . Islamaba
d is full of extremists . . . There  is a government within government . . . 
Officials are being asked to  the courts . . . Officials are being insulted by 
the judiciary.’ 
At one point he appeared wistful when reminiscing about his first three  
years in power: ‘I had total control.’ You were almost tempted to ask: ‘What  
happened then, uncle?’ But obviously, uncle didn’t need any prompting. He  
launched into his routine about three stages of democracy. He claimed he was  about 
to launch the third and final phase of democracy (the way he said it, he  
managed to make it sound like the Final Solution). And just when you thought  he 
was about to make his point, he took an abrupt turn and plunged into a deep  
pool of self-pity. This involved a long-winded anecdote about how the Supreme  
Court judges would rather attend a colleague’s daughter’s wedding than just  
get it over with and decide that he is a constitutional president  . . . I 
have heard some dictators’ speeches in my life, but nobody  has gone so far as to 
mention someone’s daughter’s wedding as a reason for  imposing martial law 
on the country. 
When for the last few minutes of his speech he addressed his audience in  the 
West in English, I suddenly felt a deep sense of humiliation. This part of  
his speech was scripted. Sentences began and ended. I felt humiliated that my  
president not only thinks that we are not evolved enough for things like  
democracy and human rights, but that we can’t even handle proper syntax and  
grammar.
The English-language version put the emphasis on the ‘war on terror’:  
Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln, he said, would have done what he did to preserve  the 
‘integrity of their country’ – the mention of Lincoln was obviously intended 
 for the US market. In Pakistan’s military academies the usual soldier-heroes 
are  Napoleon, De Gaulle and Atatürk. 
What did Benazir, now outmanoeuvred, make of the speech as she watched it on  
TV in her Dubai sanctuary? Her first response was to say she was shocked, 
which  was slightly disingenuous. Even if she had not been told in advance that 
an  emergency would be declared, it was hardly a secret – for one thing, 
Condoleezza  Rice had made a token public appeal to Musharraf not to take this 
course. Yet  for more than 24 hours she was unable to give a clear response. At one 
point she  even criticised the chief justice for being too provocative. 
Agitated phone calls from Pakistan persuaded her to return to Karachi. To put 
 her in her place, the authorities kept her plane waiting on the tarmac. When 
she  finally reached the VIP lounge, her PPP colleagues told her that unless 
she  denounced the emergency there would be a split in the party. Outsmarted 
and  abandoned by Musharraf, she couldn’t take the risk of losing key figures 
in her  party. She denounced the emergency and its perpetrator, established 
contact with  the beleaguered opposition, and, as if putting on a new lipstick, 
declared that  she would lead the struggle to get rid of the dictator. She now 
tried to call on  the chief justice to express her sympathy but wasn’t allowed 
near his  residence. 
She could have followed the example of her imprisoned colleague Aitzaz Ahsan, 
 but she was envious of him: he had become far too popular in Pakistan. He’d 
even  had the nerve to go to Washington, where he was politely received by 
society and  inspected as a possible substitute should things go badly wrong. Not 
a single  message had flowed from her Blackberry to congratulate him on his 
victories in  the struggle to reinstate the chief justice. Ahsan had advised 
her against any  deal with Musharraf. When generals are against the wall, he is 
reported to have  told her, they resort to desperate and irrational measures. 
Others who offered  similar advice in gentler language were also batted away. 
She was the PPP’s  ‘chairperson-for-life’ and brooked no dissent. The fact 
that Ahsan was proved  right irritated her even more. Any notion of political 
morality had long ago  been dumped. The very idea of a party with a consistent 
set of beliefs was  regarded as ridiculous and outdated. Ahsan was now safe in 
prison, far from the  madding hordes of Western journalists whom she received 
in style during the few  days she spent under house arrest and afterwards. She 
made a few polite noises  about his imprisonment, but nothing more. 
The go-between from Washington arrived at very short notice. Negroponte spent 
 some time with Musharraf and spoke to Benazir, still insisting that they 
make up  and go through with the deal. She immediately toned down her criticisms, 
but the  general was scathing and said in public that there was no way she 
could win the  elections scheduled for January. No doubt the ISI are going to 
rig them in  style. Had she remained loyal to him she might have lost public 
support, but he  would have made sure she had a substantial presence in the new 
parliament. Now  everything is up for grabs again. The opinion polls show that 
her old rival,  Nawaz Sharif, is well ahead of her. Musharraf’s hasty 
pilgrimage to Mecca was  probably an attempt to secure Saudi mediation in case he has 
to cut a deal with  the Sharif brothers – who have been living in exile in 
Saudi Arabia – and  sideline her completely. Both sides deny that a deal was 
done, but Sharif  returned to Pakistan with Saudi blessings and an armour-plated 
Cadillac as a  special gift from the king. Little doubt that Riyadh would 
rather him than  Benazir. 
With the country still under a state of emergency and the largest media  
network refusing to sign the oath of allegiance that would allow them back on  
air, the polls scheduled for January can only be a general’s election. It’s  
hardly a secret that the ISI and the civilian bureaucracy will decide who wins  
and where, and some of the opposition parties are, wisely, considering a  
boycott. Nawaz Sharif told the press that in the course of a long telephone call  
he had failed to persuade Benazir to join it and thereby render the process 
null  and void from the start. But now that he is back in the country it’s 
unclear  whether he will still go ahead with the boycott or try and negotiate a 
certain  number of seats with the Chaudhrys of Gujrat, who had betrayed him by 
setting up  a faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, the PML-Q, to support 
Musharraf.  Perhaps a shared bout of amnesia will bring them together again. 
What will Benazir do now? Washington’s leverage in Islamabad is limited,  
which is why they wanted her to be involved in the first place. ‘It’s always  
better,’ the US ambassador half-joked at a reception, ‘to have two phone 
numbers  in a capital.’ That may be so, but they cannot guarantee her the prime  
ministership or even a fair election. In his death-cell, her father mulled over  
similar problems and came to slightly different conclusions. If I Am  
Assassinated, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s last will and testament, was written in  
semi-Gramsci mode, but the meaning wasn’t lost on his colleagues: 
I entirely agree that the people of Pakistan will not tolerate foreign  
hegemony. On the basis of the self-same logic, the people of Pakistan would  never 
agree to an internal hegemony. The two hegemonies complement each other.  If 
our people meekly submit to internal hegemony, a priori, they will have to  
submit to external hegemony. This is so because the strength and power of  
external hegemony is far greater than that of internal hegemony. If the people  are 
too terrified to resist the weaker force, it is not possible for them to  
resist the stronger force. The acceptance of or acquiescence in internal  hegemony 
means submission to external hegemony.
After he was hanged in April 1979, the text acquired a semi-sacred status  
among his supporters. But, when in power, Bhutto père had failed to  develop any 
counter-hegemonic strategy or institutions, other than the 1973  constitution 
drafted by the veteran civil rights lawyer Mahmud Ali Kasuri (whose  son 
Khurshid was until recently the foreign minister). A personality-driven,  
autocratic style of governance had neutered the spirit of the party, encouraged  
careerists and finally paved the way for his enemies. He was the victim of a  grave 
injustice; his death removed all the warts and transformed him into a  
martyr. More than half the country, mainly the poor, mourned his passing. 
The tragedy led to the PPP being treated as a family heirloom, which was  
unhealthy for both party and country. It provided the Bhuttos with a vote-bank  
and large reserves. But the experience of her father’s trial and death  
radicalised and politicised his daughter. She would have preferred, she told me  at 
the time, to be a diplomat. Her two brothers, Murtaza and Shahnawaz, were in  
London, having been forbidden to return home by their imprisoned father. The  
burden of trying to save her father’s life fell on Benazir and her mother,  
Nusrat, and the courage they exhibited won them the silent respect of a  
frightened majority. They refused to cave in to General Zia’s military  dictatorship, 
which apart from anything else was invoking Islam to claw back  rights won by 
women in previous decades. Benazir and Nusrat Bhutto were arrested  and 
released several times. Their health began to suffer. Nusrat was allowed to  leave 
the country to seek medical advice in 1982. Benazir was released a little  more 
than a year later thanks, in part, to US pressure orchestrated by her old  
Harvard friend Peter Galbraith. She later described the period in her memoir,  
Daughter of the East (1988); it included photo-captions such as:  ‘Shortly 
after President Reagan praised the regime for making “great strides  towards 
democracy”, Zia’s henchmen gunned down peaceful demonstrators marking  Pakistan 
Independence Day. The police were just as brutal to those protesting at  the 
attack on my jeep in January 1987.’ 
Her tiny Barbican flat in London became the centre of opposition to the  
dictatorship, and it was here that we often discussed a campaign to take on the  
generals. Benazir had built up her position by steadfastly and peacefully  
resisting the military and replying to every slander with a cutting retort. Her  
brothers had been operating on a different level. They set up an armed group,  
al-Zulfiqar, whose declared aim was to harass and weaken the regime by 
targeting  ‘traitors who had collaborated with Zia’. The principal volunteers were  
recruited inside Pakistan and in 1980 they were provided with a base in  
Afghanistan, where the pro-Moscow Communists had taken power three years before.  
It is a sad story with a fair share of factionalism, show-trials, petty  
rivalries, fantasies of every sort and death for the group’s less fortunate  
members. 
In March 1981 Murtaza and Shahnawaz Bhutto were placed on the FIA’s most  
wanted list. They had hijacked a Pakistan International airliner soon after it  
left Karachi (a power cut had paralysed the X-ray machines, enabling the  
hijackers to take their weapons on board); it was diverted to Kabul. Here  Murtaza 
took over and demanded the release of political prisoners. A young  military 
officer on board the flight was murdered. The plane refuelled and went  on to 
Damascus, where the Syrian spymaster General Kholi took charge and ensured  
there were no more deaths. The fact that there were American passengers on the  
plane was a major consideration for the generals and, for that reason alone, 
the  prisoners in Pakistan were released and flown to Tripoli. 
This was seen as a victory and welcomed as such by the PPP in Pakistan. For  
the first time the group began to be taken seriously. A key target inside the  
country was Maulvi Mushtaq Hussain, the chief justice of the High Court in  
Lahore, who, in 1978, had sentenced Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to death, and whose  
behaviour in court had shocked even those who were hostile to the PPP. (Among  
other charges, he had accused Bhutto of ‘pretending to be a Muslim’ – his 
mother  was a Hindu convert.) Mushtaq was in a friend’s car being driven to his 
home in  Lahore’s Model Town area when al-Zulfiqar gunmen opened fire. The judge 
 survived, but his friend and the driver died. The friend was one of the  
Chaudhrys of Gujrat: Chaudhry Zahoor Elahi, a dodgy businessman who had  
ostentatiously asked General Zia to make him a present of the ‘sacred pen’ with  
which he had signed Bhutto’s death warrant. The pen became a family heirloom.  
Zahoor Elahi may not have been the target but al-Zulfiqar, embarrassed at  
missing the judge, claimed he was also on their list, which may have been  true. 
It is the next generation of Chaudhrys that currently provides Musharraf with 
 civilian ballast: Zahoor Elahi’s son Shujaat organised the split with Nawaz  
Sharif and created the splinter PML-Q to ease the growing pains of the new  
regime. He still fixes deals and wanted an emergency imposed much earlier to  
circumvent the deal with Benazir. He will now mastermind the general’s election 
 campaign. His cousin Pervez Elahi is chief minister of the Punjab; his son, 
in  turn, is busy continuing the family tradition by evicting tenants and 
buying up  all the available land on the edge of Lahore. It has not been divulged 
which  member of the family guards the sacred pen. 
The hijacking meanwhile had annoyed Moscow, and the regime in Afghanistan  
asked the Bhutto brothers to find another refuge. While in Kabul, they had  
married two Afghan sisters, Fauzia and Rehana Fasihudin, daughters of a senior  
official at the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Together with their wives  
they now left the country and after a sojourn in Syria and possibly Libya ended 
 up in Europe. The reunion with their sister took place on the French Riviera 
in  1985, a setting better suited to the lifestyles of all three siblings. 
The young men feared General Zia’s agents. Each had a young daughter.  
Shahnawaz lived in an apartment in Cannes. He had been in charge of the  ‘military 
apparatus’ and life in Kabul had exacted a heavier toll on him. He was  edgy 
and nervous. Relations with his wife were stormy and he told his sister  that he 
was preparing to divorce her. ‘There’s never been a divorce in the  family. 
Your marriage wasn’t even an arranged one . . . You chose to  marry Rehana. 
You must live with it,’ was Benazir’s revealing reply, according  to her 
memoir. And then Shahnawaz was found dead in his apartment. His wife  claimed he had 
taken poison, but according to Benazir nobody in the family  believed her 
story; there had been violence in the room and his papers had been  searched. 
Rehana looked immaculate, which disturbed the family. She was  imprisoned for 
three months under the ‘Good Samaritan’ law for not having gone  to the 
assistance of a dying person. After her release she settled in the United  States. ‘
Had the CIA killed him as a friendly gesture towards their favourite  dictator?’ 
Benazir speculated. She raised other questions too: had the sisters  become 
ISI agents? The truth remains hidden. Not long afterwards Murtaza  divorced 
Fauzia, but kept custody of their three-year-old daughter, Fatima, and  moved to 
Damascus. Here he had plenty of time for reflection and told friends  that too 
many mistakes had been made. In 1986 he met Ghinwa Itaoui, a young  teacher 
who had fled Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of 1982. She calmed him  down 
and took charge of Fatima’s education. They were married in 1989 and a son,  
Zulfiqar, was born the following year. 
Benazir returned to Pakistan in 1986 and was greeted by large crowds who came 
 out to show their affection for her and to demonstrate their anger with the  
regime. She campaigned all over the country, but felt increasingly that for 
some  of the more religious-minded a young unmarried woman was not acceptable 
as a  leader. How could she visit Saudi Arabia without a husband? An offer of 
marriage  from the Zardari family was accepted and she married Asif in 1987. 
She had  worried that any husband would find it difficult to deal with the 
periods of  separation her nomadic political life would entail, but Zardari was 
perfectly  capable of occupying himself. 
A year later General Zia’s plane blew up in midair. In the elections that  
followed the PPP won the largest number of seats. Benazir became prime minister, 
 but was hemmed in by the army on one side and the president, the army’s  
favourite bureaucrat, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, on the other. She told me at the time  
that she felt powerless. They wouldn’t let her do anything. ‘Tell the people,’ 
 was my advice. Tell them why you can’t deliver on your promises to provide 
free  education, proper sanitation, clean water and health services to improve 
the  high infant mortality rate. She didn’t tell them; in fact she did nothing 
at all  apart from provide employment to some of her supporters. Being in 
power, it  seemed, was satisfaction enough. She went on state visits: met and 
liked Mrs  Thatcher and later, with her new husband in tow, was received politely 
by the  Saudi king. In the meantime there were other plots afoot – the 
opposition was  literally buying off some of her MPs – and in August 1990 her 
government was  removed by presidential decree and Zia’s protégés, the Sharif 
brothers, were  back in power. 
By the time she was re-elected 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. It is widely alleged that the couple 
accumulated  $1.5 billion. The high command of the Pakistan People’s Party now became a 
 machine for making money, but without any trickle-down mechanism. This 
period  marked the complete degeneration of the party. All that shame-faced party  
members could say, when I asked, was that ‘everybody does it all over the  
world,’ thus accepting that the cash nexus was now all that mattered. In foreign  
policy her 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  in the LRB (15 April 1999), her government backed the Taliban takeover  in 
Kabul – which makes it doubly ironic that Washington and London should be  
promoting her as a champion of democracy. 
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 favour of the old party’s 
radical  manifesto. He made no secret of the fact 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. He rang Zardari and invited him round for an informal chat 
sans  bodyguards to try and 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 cut-throat razor and some warm water 
and Murtaza  shaved off half of Zardari’s moustache 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  moustache made him too recognisable a target. In which case 
why did he allow it  to sprout again immediately afterwards? 
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 street lights 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 open 
fire.  The police opened fire instead and seven men were killed, Murtaza among 
them.  The fatal bullet had been fired at close range. The trap had been 
carefully  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  non-event in Egypt, a policeman killed who they feared might talk – made it 
 obvious that the decision to execute the prime minister’s brother had been 
taken  at a very high level. 
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 1978). The  
family inside felt something was wrong. At this point, a remarkably composed  
Fatima Bhutto, aged 14, decided to ring 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. It was Zardari who 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. There was no sign on the street outside that anything had happened:  
the scene of the killing had been wiped clean of all evidence. There were no  
traces of blood and no signs of any disturbance. They drove straight to the  
hospital but it was too late; Murtaza was already dead. Later they learned 
that  he had been left bleeding on the ground for almost an hour before being 
taken to  a hospital where there were no emergency facilities of any kind. 
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 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 it was for this reason that 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,  hopped on a motorboat and fled Karachi for the Gulf and thence the 
US. 
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 there was no legally acceptable evidence to link Zardari to 
 the incident, but accepted that ‘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 it happened that 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 in the LA Times on 14 November elicited the 
 following response: ‘My niece is angry with me.’ Well, yes. 
Musharraf may have withdrawn the corruption charges, but three other cases  
are proceeding in Switzerland, Spain and Britain. 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 19 September 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 (afflicted  with 
Alzheimer’s disease). 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 continues. Last month 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 concern 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 Pakistan government, Zardari came forward and accepted  ownership. 
Last year, Lord Justice Collins ruled that, while he was not making  any ‘
findings of fact’, there was a ‘reasonable prospect’ that the Pakistan  government 
might be able to establish that Rockwood had been bought and  furnished with ‘
the fruits of corruption’. A close friend of Benazir told me  that she was 
genuinely not involved in this one, since Zardari wasn’t thinking  of spending 
much time there with her. 
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 Washington had pushed the marriage of convenience: ‘A progressive,  
reform-minded, more cosmopolitan party in government would help the US.’ As  
their finances reveal, the Zardaris are certainly cosmopolitan. 
What then is at stake in Pakistan as far as Washington is concerned? ‘The  
concern I have,’ Robert Gates, the US secretary for defense, recently said, ‘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 is Washington’s over-reliance on Musharraf and  
the Pakistani military. It is Washington’s support and funding that 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 i
s 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 15 June 1979 dealt with Pakistan; a senior Western diplomat was  
quoted as saying that the big danger was ‘that there is another Gaddafi 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 destabilised.’ 
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 US invasion and occupation, for example) for this army to feel  
threatened by a jihadi uprising. Two considerations unite senior officers: the  
unity of the organisation 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 takes hold, the Taliban is gaining more and more recruits. The  
generals who 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 US 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 neighbour 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 semi-sleep, unless something unpredictable 
rouses them  again. This is always possible. 
30 November



 
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