Which is more shameful: Pervez Musharraf’s moves toward dictatorship, or Benazir Bhutto’s posturing as an advocate of democracy? The current crisis in Pakistan has more than a little to do with the U.S.-orchestrated return of Ms. Bhutto to Pakistani politics, reinventing herself as an advocate of civil liberty. Bhutto’s actual record paints a very different picture, reflecting an all too common populist practice of using democracy as a rhetorical device to promote one’s own power interest. The complicity of the United States in this bungled powersharing reveals how even the most vocal exponents of liberal democratic theory can have Machiavellian attitudes toward its implementation.
Benazir Bhutto’s political career is tainted by extravagant corruption, human rights abuses, racism, and complicity with terrorism. In her two terms as prime minister, she lived an opulent lifestyle thanks in large part to her husband Asif Zardari’s acceptance of bribes from foreign governments and contractors, earning himself the nickname of “Mr. Ten Percent”. Ms. Bhutto’s partisans have tried to argue that the allegations of corruption were fabricated by her political enemies in Pakistan, despite the fact that the governments of Switzerland, Poland and France have independently charged her regime with corruption and money laundering. In particular, the French have their own document trail showing that Dassault was given an exclusive contract to sell fighters to Pakistan in exchange for paying 5% commission to a corporation owned by Zardari. Bhutto and her husband accumulated over £740 million in their Swiss bank accounts. Her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which ruled 1988-90 and 1993-97, was twice dismissed from power because of corruption charges. Ms. Bhutto left Pakistan in 1998 to escape prosecution, and her recent return to Pakistan was conditioned upon amnesty for all corruption charges. She was even allowed access to her Swiss bank accounts!
The Bush administration has gone to considerable lengths to rehabilitate this dirty politician, even if they recognize that Musharraf remains the best hope for stability in Pakistan against Islamic terrorism. The administration’s calls for free and open elections might be regarded less skeptically were it not for the transparent efforts to place Bhutto as a counterweight to Musharraf. Ms. Bhutto is a strange poster child for democracy, since she is not subject to any party primaries, declaring herself party leader for life. Further, her reign (and that of her father) was filled with human rights abuses, including torture and extrajudicial killings, as reported by Amnesty International in 1997 and 1998.
The real reason for the U.S. attempt to shift the power balance in Pakistan is dissatisfaction with Musharraf’s handling of the “war on terrorism.” The U.S. has long tolerated Musharraf’s military regime out of security considerations, namely the protection of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal from Islamic militants, and cooperation in hunting al-Qaeda criminals along the border with Afghanistan. Despite Musharraf’s strongly cooperative posture in anti-terrorism efforts since 2002, he has drawn the line at allowing U.S. troops into Pakistan. This stance, combined with his apparent concessions to local tribes protecting Islamic militants, has practically guaranteed a safe haven in Pakistan for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The stagnation on this front can be seen by the lack of progress in locating Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders, as well as the increasingly audacious acts of sabotage and assassination attempts by Pakistani militants.
It is by no means clear that Ms. Bhutto and her party would fare better in counter-terrorist efforts, especially given their track record. In 1996, Bhutto formally recognized the Taliban government in Afghanistan, and covertly funded the regime through her interior ministry. Domestically, she took a decidedly racial attitude toward terrorism, blaming it primarily on the dark-skinned Muhajirs, whom she derided as “rats” in a 1995 speech to a Punjabi audience, adding that they “do not have the same blood in their veins as you and I have.” Ironically, Ms. Bhutto herself is of the minority Sindhi race, so to gain acceptance among Punjabis, she has had to pander to popular contempt for the Muhajirs, who are not regarded as Pakistanis. Accordingly, under the guise of counterterrorism, Bhutto prevented the Muhajir political party from participating in local elections in 1996. Today, the most famous Muhajir is Gen. Musharraf.
Bhutto’s obvious flaws are overlooked by many in the West largely because she is a very comforting figure from a Western perspective. The fair-skinned Bhutto was educated in Western schools from her childhood, before moving on to Harvard and Oxford, so she seems like a Westerner and might be assumed to have a similar admiration for liberal democracy. This assumption might have too much truth in it, since, like her Western counterparts, Bhutto values the rhetoric of democracy above its practice. True to this pragmatism, it is enough for most Westerners that Bhutto is pro-Western, regardless of whether she is pro-democracy. The neoconservatives hope that Bhutto will allow U.S. troops in Pakistan, while the liberals naively suppose she will enhance the status of women in Pakistan, ignorant of her prior record of upholding Muslim exceptions to international standards on women’s rights. More broadly, conservative and liberal Westerners alike have a deep-seated contempt for traditional Islam, whether because of its opposition to Christianity and its supposed association with violence, or because of its refusal to conform to modern liberal notions of individual liberty and gender equality. Bhutto is a less traditional Muslim figure, which is good from both liberal and conservative Western perspectives, as both factions want to see Islam secularized and weak.
This meddling in the domestic affairs of Pakistan has already resulted in hundreds of deaths and provoked Musharraf to declare a state of emergency rule. The needlessly provocative re-entry of Bhutto into Pakistan could have been avoided by merely rehabilitating her party without restoring its controversial leader. The United States evidently sees something it likes in Ms. Bhutto specifically, perhaps the fact that she is the only other figure in Pakistan with sufficient charisma to serve as a counterweight to Musharraf. The Bush administration is not seeking to overthrow Musharraf, so much as to chasten him into changing policy. Unlike previous U.S. clients such as Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein, Musharraf remains useful, if not indispensable, to American strategic interests, so there is no motive to depose him. In fact, his loss of power would bring likely chaos and possible Islamic rule, which is a common reaction to center-left Western-supported regimes like Bhutto’s would be. It is likely that the near-catastrophic consequences of this intervention have gone far beyond what the Americans expected, so that the U.S. faces the real possibility of having inadvertently precipitated its worst-case scenario for Pakistan.
Update (27 Dec 2007)
Today Benazir Bhutto was tragically assassinated in a terrorist attack. In the next few weeks or months, we will return to this issue as the implications of this event become clear. It remains to be seen how the PPP may re-invent itself with new leadership, or to what extent Musharraf’s forces are responsible for such security breaches. What is clear now is that Western intervention in Pakistani politics carries grave perils and can easily result in unintended chaos.