Benazir Bhutto - SZABIST

She would have been in a good position to know about this connection, because when she was prime
minister, she pursued a very active pro-Taliban policy, designed to extend and entrench Pakistani
control over Afghanistan and to give Pakistan strategic depth in its long confrontation with India over
Kashmir. The fact of the matter is that Benazir's undoubted courage had a certain fanaticism to it. She
had the largest Electra complex of any female politician in modern history, entirely consecrated to the
memory of her executed father, the charming and unscrupulous Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former prime
minister, who had once boasted that the people of Pakistan would eat grass before they would give up
the struggle to acquire a nuclear weapon. A nominal socialist, Zulfikar Bhutto was an autocratic
opportunist, and this family tradition was carried on by the PPP, a supposedly populist party that never
had a genuine internal election and was in fact—like quite a lot else in Pakistan—Bhutto family
property.
Daughter of Destiny is the title she gave to her autobiography. She always displayed the same unironic
lack of embarrassment. How prettily she lied to me, I remember, and with such a level gaze from
those topaz eyes, about how exclusively peaceful and civilian Pakistan's nuclear program was. How
righteously indignant she always sounded when asked unwelcome questions about the vast corruption
alleged against her and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari. (The Swiss courts recently found against her in
this matter; an excellent background piece was written by John Burns in the New York Times in
1998.) And now the two main legacies of Bhutto rule—the nukes and the empowered Islamists—have
moved measurably closer together.
This is what makes her murder such a disaster. There is at least some reason to think that she had truly
changed her mind, at least on the Taliban and al-Qaida, and was willing to help lead a battle against
them. She had, according to some reports, severed the connection with her rather questionable
husband. She was attempting to make the connection between lack of democracy in Pakistan and the
rise of mullah-manipulated fanaticism. Of those preparing to contest the highly dubious upcoming
elections, she was the only candidate with anything approaching a mass appeal to set against the siren
calls of the fundamentalists. And, right to the end, she carried on without the fetish of "security" and
with lofty disregard for her own safety.
This courage could sometimes have been worthy of a finer cause, and many of the problems she
claimed to solve were partly of her own making. Nonetheless, she perhaps did have a hint of destiny
about her.
The impact of the Bhuttos
Slate Magazine
December 27, 2007
Farahnaz Ispahani
The brutal and tragic assassination of Pakistan’s beloved princess of democracy, Shaheed Benazir
Bhutto, has unleashed a wave of emotion throughout the country. Generals, bureaucrats, financial
analysts and other hard-nosed types are trained not to be emotional. That is why none of them succeed
in understanding populist politics. Only those who understand what my husband Professor Husain
Haqqani calls “the sentimental dimension of politics” know why the Bhutto family commands such
devotion among the impoverished masses.