Benazir Bhutto: A Killing and Three Funerals

When you know someone personally and have seen them recently, their death at the hands of terrorists seems more real, and more nauseating, than when you hear about the terrible killings of strangers. Somehow, you are more likely to imagine real flesh and real blood and bone. When you see a photo of the coffin, with a window for looking inside, and something in there wrapped in white satin, you are likely to remember the physical person, sitting opposite you on a sofa in a black shalwar kameez, and how she sat with her legs crossed and talked about her children, and smiled and looked at you and served you cookies -- and then how, less than 24 hours ago, she was waving and smiling at the crowd two seconds before she was shot, and then bombed. It's an eerie feeling. History is stopped so neatly and finally by an assassination, and then sent spiraling off in a new direction. It's such an effective political tool. One has only to remember the killing of Yitzhak Rabin.

This is a funeral not just for Benazir but for the Bhutto era in Pakistan. The Bhutto family stood at an important historical intersection for Pakistan: the place where old autocratic feudal landholders and their political methods finally met the modern world. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir's father and the family patriarch, was such a landholder, whose hundreds of thousands of family-owned acres in Sindh province were worked by virtual serfs who would bow and kiss his hand when he toured the fields. He used his authority among the people and politicians of Sindh and his warm relations with the US to cobble together a populist agenda and international program for Pakistan that won him support among the masses and world stature. Among his agendas was Pakistan's nuclear program. "My father," Benazir told me proudly, when I talked to her a month before she returned to Pakistan, "gave Pakistan the nuclear bomb."

When she first came to Harvard at the age of 16, Benazir, who had never had to lift a finger on her own behalf before, was like a princess from the Raj, raised by ayahs, nursemaids, and butlers. Some of that feeling of sheer entitlement and condescension was never to leave her. A minister who once confronted her when she was prime minister recalls her saying to him, "How dare you speak to me like that!" That was the queen in her. But there was also the young slender politician who -- for all her Harvard and Oxford education -- was willing to climb up onto the roofs of cars and talk to huge crowds of men, with a bullhorn her only defense, as Christopher Hitchens recalled in his piece in Slate yesterday. Back then, the crowds listened. No guns, no bombs. Like her father, Benazir was promoting a kind of democracy for Pakistan. Indeed, she ran for office in the shadow of the gallows where Zulfikar Bhutto had been hanged by President Zia ul Haq, an assassination dressed up as a de jure execution.

Benazir's funeral is also a funeral for recent American policy in Pakistan. As in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush's policies have failed in Pakistan, have failed to conform to the political facts on the ground. Musharraf has not been an entirely satisfactory lapdog for Bush, because he understands that in today's Pakistan, if you sit in the American lap your ambitions will be smothered. And to the degree that he has bowed to U.S. wishes, his popularity among Pakistanis has been undermined. Gone are the days when Reagan's or Nixon's approval could boost the standing of a Pakistani leader at home, as in the cases of first Zulfikar Bhutto, and then Benazir. Osama bin Laden is far more popular in Pakistan than Bush or Musharraf, which explains why, in Pakistan today, bin Laden is (theoretically at least) alive and Benazir Bhutto is dead. Pakistan is a changed country whose process of change was only accelerated by September 11th.

It's not accidental, by the way, that Danny Pearl got into his trouble by misjudging the complexity and danger of this same Pakistan. Like Pearl, Benazir was using an operating manual for an older, somewhat gentler Pakistan. Back then, it was a Bhutto-worshipping Pakistan, one where the people, no matter how fired up and by whom, would not touch a hair on the head of a Bhutto; and only an authority like Zia could harm the family -- Zia, or another Bhutto.

Somewhere in Benazir's mind -- in spite of ten years of daily bulletins from people back home, in spite of all the threats and menaces, in spite of what she saw on the ground upon her return, and even in spite of the blistering, bloody attack of that first day -- somewhere in her mind, this Pakistan still existed. This Pakistan where the old power elites still ruled, and where owning land meant running the country. Where you could still trust the old post-Partition power bases, and stand up and wave to the people royally from your car. This was still the turf on which she ran, with Bush alongside. She refused to accept that this Pakistan, her imaginative homeland, was just a memory, as people will refuse to do when they are orphaned, or have lost their homes and families.

But in fact, the Pakistan that Bhutto loved, and to which she was returning, was no longer a reality. Now the country is nominally run by a corrupt Army that feeds off international aid, by a shadowy intelligence organization that plays every side of the game, and by radical warlords who control their fiefdoms along the Afghan border. Intellectually of course, Benazir knew this. While she held her imaginary Pakistan in one dreamy compartment of her mind, she tried to deal with contemporary Pakistan in the more practical compartment. Army, ISI, warlords... The first, she agreed to do business with, no matter how unpopular this stance was (the Americans demanded it). The second, she reviled publicly (she knew her real enemy). And the third, she vowed to destroy. Still, as her father's daughter, she couldn't obey the ineluctable logic of the new Pakistan: wouldn't stay inside, wouldn't shun the people, wouldn't go back into exile after the first attack.

She thrived on the drama of danger precisely because she assumed that she would always escape. And she believed you had to go to the people because she knew that -- Bush or no Bush -- her power resided with her popularity. After her first two degraded premierships, she was seeking political redemption, and for that, she had to plunge, as her father before her had, and as she herself always had, into the constituency. In the case of the Bhuttos, the constituency is all Pakistan. Interestingly, if her people died because of her, she minded, but not too much. It was a collateral damage she could put up with, even when, as in October, the death toll went past 100.

And now she has died alongside them, something she was unable to imagine.

"Death is a proof of sincerity," Graham Greene wrote in The Comedians. That holds true here.

As for the motivations of the killers. Their real targets were secular liberalism, the Bhutto dynasty, and the U.S. What they feared was a Bhutto premiership, beginning in about ten days, when the elections were to take place. Whoever they are exactly, they see an opening to power and control now, and they would not permit Benazir to stand in their way.

LA Times: The Benazir I Knew

Amy's profile of Benazir Bhutto appears in the December/January issue of More magazine.

Read more reactions from HuffPost bloggers on Benazir Bhutto's assassination

Comments

[Synoia]

Hmm, a liberal progressive from the ruling aristocracy?

I really don't recall Benezir as a liberal progressive, I do remember many claims of corruption before and after the copus that deposed her, and her father. How reliable and accurate was the press then? Unknown.

Her assination could also be fueled by hatred of the aristocracy -- not much loved anywhere.

I'm sorry, I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but I don't see her in the same shining light -- more like "plus sa change, c'est plus le meme chose".

I do remember when Musharraf was feted as a "new leader" to stamp out corruption...

Which supports, yet again "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutly"

It hard, if not impossible, to believe she was back in Parkistan "for the good of the parkistanu people". It is possible that this was a calculated attempt to gain power.

Why did her two brothers die in "misterious curcumstances"? Her, and all her family, appear to be much disliked.

[gemcando06]

Are we certain that BB wasn't Greek? If ever there was a tragedy, this was it. The horror of her return - war in the streets. Certainly, BB must have known that this would be the outcome?

Compulsion, Hubris, what? The stuff of Greek tragedy. Any land that hung BB's father would be a horror to return to - her children reared as foreigners not fluid in the native custom or language; strangers to keep them safe.

Any sane woman would have stayed in exile - in the relative safety of a foreign land - writing and commenting on her homeland.

[Rosanneofpgh]

Degraded premiership, didnt much mind collateral damage, queen in her, sheer entitlement and condescension, autocractic tendencies and corruption.

Geez, ame, this sounds more like a hit piece on Ms Bhutto and her father than a eulogy for a political martyr.

With "friends" like you, who needs enemies??

[dalelegan]

Bhutto Agreed With Ron Paul about America's Policy...

Parade Magazine will be publishing an interview with Benazir Buhtto on January 6th. Here is a pertinent excerpt:

What would you like to tell President Bush? I ask this riddle of a woman.

She would tell him, she replies, that propping up Musharraf's government, which is infested with radical Islamists, is only hastening disaster. "I would say, 'Your policy of supporting dictatorship is breaking up my country.' I now think al-Qaeda can be marching on Islamabad in two to four years."

The interview is here:

http://www.parade.com/benazir_bhutto_interview.html

She also said on Larry King that Osama was dead. She was no lap dog of Bush.

It is crazy to think that Pakistan Nukes could ever be launched to America. Propoganda.
We need to get out of other countries business. Supporting a dictator to promote "democracy" is one of the stupides things I've ever heard. Al Qaeda's narrative is that we support puppet governments and it is true. Stop feeding their propoganda.

Ron Paul is the only one who makes sense!!

[anastasiabeaverhousen]

I remember reading and commenting on Benazir Bhutto's post here on HuffPo - couldn't have been more than 60days ago. She was very candid about her country's need for her leadership and the call she heeded to return. She knew full well what could happen and unfortunately, it did.

I just hope that the masses currently demonstrating and mourning her death begin to spell the end of terrorism in her beloved country.

The people are standing up and saying 'enough is enough'. God speed them and God speed Benazir Bhutto to her final rest.

How tragic, really.

[transendentilist]

It is always a tragedy when a peace maker and forward thinker is taken from us, especially by such violent means. She was a very brave and determined woman. That being said, she was also reckless, and should never have gone down the street in an open vehicle. It was almost as if she wanted to get killed.
Bhutto was seen as a threat to Musharef. The Pakistanis are obviously not too enamored of Musharef. Al Qaida knew that if Bhutto was allowed to be prime minister again, that their little hide out in the mountainous regions in the north would be routed out. Musharef and baby bush will not let the military go there. WHY NOT???

[SamThornton]

Amy, your insight and analysis have the ring of truth. The downfall of more than one leader has been their own hubris. In this, Benazir Bhutto appears to be iconic.

[bach]

I just had to read your blog 'cause you used the word "ineluctable".

[ebbtide]

From what I have been reading on the nets. I am no expert in the politics of Pakistan, so consider this a learming experience.

From reputable sources, such as Juan Cole, Condi Rice, in secret conversations and meetings, convinced Bhutto to come out of the exile she was living in, in order to either boost Mashariff's position, or to topple Masharif. She is cited as supporting a UN military base in Pakistan. In a country where %70 of the people hate America and the Bush regime, this could not have been a wise policy decision. Bhutto, in spite of all her accomplishments, and in spite of all her flaws, and she had a few--corruption being named as one, failed to see the set up. In my mind, it was never mind the democracy, it was get the damned military base in Pakistan and we can proceed to take over that country also.

Her assassination is in part, the fault of Condi Rice, the Bush administration and Cheney and all they have done to occupy, murder and destroy the sovreignty of other countries.