From the WSJ Opinion Archives
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Reversal of Fortune
In an August interview, Benazir Bhutto discusses her plans to return to Pakistan.
(Editor's note: This interview appeared in The Wall Street Journal on Aug. 11. Benazir Bhutto was assasinated today in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.)
NEW YORK--Benazir Bhutto is not the sort of woman who inspires indifference. Admirers and detractors alike broadly agree that the former two-time prime minister is Pakistan's most gifted politician: an Oxford Union-trained debater, an heiress to the Pakistani equivalent of the Kennedy name, and hardly less beautiful today than when she first took office in 1988 at the age of 35.
Beyond that, opinions diverge. Either she is the hope for the country's democratic future or a blast from its corrupt past; the authentic voice of its people or the emblem of a self-serving elite; a martyr or a mesmerist.
Now Ms. Bhutto is poised to again play a leading role in Pakistan's political life, after an eight-year absence from the country. Rumors have been flying since late last month that she met secretly with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in Abu Dhabi to discuss a power-sharing arrangement. These are rumors she makes no effort to deny during a visit Wednesday to the Journal's editorial offices.
"It's the most famous 'non-meeting' because neither he nor I have officially confirmed that the meeting took place," she says, stressing the word officially. "I don't know why . . . but we haven't officially confirmed it. But we have been in negotiations with Gen. Musharraf."
Just several months ago, even a non-meeting would have been inconceivable. Ms. Bhutto fled Pakistan in 1999 to avoid prosecution on extensive charges of graft.
Among other allegations, she and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, are said to have taken anywhere between $100 million and $1.5 billion in a series of kickback and bribery schemes involving everything from oil concessions to import and export monopolies to technical and defense contracts. (In one notable instance, Mr. Zardari is said to have arranged for a 5% kickback on a contract for 32 Mirage jets, only to see the deal unravel when Ms. Bhutto was forced from office in 1996.) Yet in April of this year Mr. Musharraf abruptly shut down a special unit investigating the charges and sent the lead investigator packing to a provincial post in Punjab.
Ms. Bhutto describes the graft charges as an effort "to divert attention from the institutionalized corruption of the military." Whatever the case, Mr. Musharraf's decision to drop the corruption probe created political opportunities for them both. On Ms. Bhutto's side, it means a ticket home, an opportunity to run for parliament in forthcoming elections and--assuming her Pakistan People's Party does well and a law forbidding third terms for prime ministers is reversed--a return to her old job.
On Mr. Musharraf's side, coming to terms with Ms. Bhutto may be his only way out of an escalating domestic political crisis. The crisis began with his ill-conceived decision to sack the country's chief justice, which led to massive protests by civil society activists and was later reversed by the full Supreme Court. There followed a bloody assault on Islamabad's militant Red Mosque, which has led to a wave of terrorist violence. To compound his problems, Mr. Musharraf has lost substantial support in the United States since a deal he struck last year with tribal groups in Pakistan's remote hinterlands created safe havens for both the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Ms. Bhutto offers what amounts to a double diagnosis of Mr. Musharraf's problems, one narrowly political, another fundamentally philosophical.
On the political front, she says, Mr. Musharraf "has had a set of partners since 2002, the last elections, and it's under those partners that extremism has spread in the country. Now as these negotiations have been going on with the Pakistan People's Party, that group is worried that it's going to lose control. . . . So they are trying to jettison the return to democracy."
According to this analysis, Mr. Musharraf's problem, in effect, is that he is attempting to oblige two opposite constituencies: on the one hand, Islamic political parties, on whom he depends for parliamentary support and as a bulwark against Pakistan's democratic forces; on the other hand, the U.S., on whom he also depends for financial support, international legitimacy and a genuinely shared interest in combating al Qaeda (though not necessarily lesser terrorist groups).
Not without reason, Ms. Bhutto sees herself as the solution to Mr. Musharraf's problems, provided he's willing to come to terms with her various demands. "In Pakistan there are two fault lines," she says. "One is dictatorship versus democracy. And one is moderation versus extremism. So while we are on opposite sides of the spectrum on the one end we have something in common on the other end. So we have been meeting with Gen. Musharraf to see how we could agree on a plan to move Pakistan in the direction of credible elections and the restoration of a truly democratic government."
But Ms. Bhutto also offers a more subtle and cohesive analysis for what she describes as Mr. Musharraf's "ambiguity of policies" toward Islamic extremism. "The military regime," she argues, "needs the threat of al Qaeda and the militants to justify military rule, to justify the derailment of democracy . . . and also because it brings the money in. You see, if there is no threat, there is no money."
This is not an idle theory. As Ms. Bhutto accurately recounts, U.S. assistance to Pakistan has followed a stop-go pattern for over 50 years, often to disastrous effect. Aid flowed in the 1950s and '60s, when Pakistan was seen as an ally against the Soviet Union and Soviet-tilting India. (Gary Francis Powers's U-2 spy plane, which was shot down by the Soviet Union in May 1960, took off from an airbase near Peshawar.) It dried up in the 1970s, a period when Ms. Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, dominated Pakistan's political scene until his execution at the hands of his successor.
Aid resumed in the 1980s, when the U.S. needed Pakistan to wage a proxy war against the Russians in Afghanistan. It evaporated again after the war, when Pakistan was sanctioned by the U.S. for its nuclear programs. And it resumed again when Pakistan was called into service against al Qaeda after Sept. 11, 2001.
Now prominent American voices--a certain U.S. Senator from Illinois among them--are calling for a new hard line against Pakistan, including unilateral U.S. military action in the tribal areas. How does Ms. Bhutto feel about Barack Obama's tough-guy act?
She grimaces. "I was disturbed by his comments. And I was disturbed because any unilateral attack will unite all Pakistanis together because they will see it as a threat against our country."
What Ms. Bhutto proposes instead is for Pakistan itself to do more. "We'd like to work closely with NATO and the United States in eliminating militancy," she says. "But I think enough effort hasn't been made by Pakistan on its own in those areas. . . . If the government had the consistent and persistent will to take them on then I think government writ can be established."
Ms. Bhutto is unimpressed with suggestions that the tribal areas are simply too wild to govern or police: She claims she cleaned out drug barons--as violent and heavily armed then as the Taliban and al Qaeda are today--from the area in the late 1980s. It's part of her larger complaint against Mr. Musharraf's government and what she charges are its ongoing links to extremists.
"Whether Gen. Musharraf is colluding in what is happening, or whether he is ineffective in dealing with it . . . the net result is the same," she says. "And what has really bothered me from the very beginning is the type of people around Gen. Musharraf." She gives the example of Brigadier Ijaz Shah, who runs Pakistan's intelligence bureau: "Brigadier Shah and the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] recruited Omar Sheikh, who killed Danny Pearl. So I would feel very uncomfortable making the intelligence bureau, which has more than 100,000 people underneath it, run by a man who worked so closely with militants and extremists."
Ms. Bhutto also raises hard questions about the long chain of decisions leading up to the Red Mosque showdown. "Three years ago when [mosque ringleader Abudl Rashid] Ghazi was arrested bringing weapons into Islamabad to store at the Red Mosque, the minister of religious affairs had him freed. There is no question of the Homeland Security officer in America, for example, releasing terrorists who are caught with weapons."
What does all this portend for Pakistan? Ms. Bhutto is by turns hopeful and despondent. "Pakistan is still caught in a time warp, it is still the same battle lines between the modernizers and the extremists. But unfortunately the long period of military rule has emboldened the extremists. . . . I think it is just a matter of five to 10 years, if they continue building as many militant headquarters as they have in the last five years, it may be too late. They have been building and building and building."
The remedy to all this, says Ms. Bhutto, is democracy, plain and simple. She does not believe that Pakistani society has become more illiberal in its political outlook, despite the almost metastatic growth of radical madrassas (religious schools) in recent years. On the contrary, she argues that the increasing--and increasingly unrestrained--power of militants to compel or kill ordinary people to get what they want has created a huge backlash, one that could make itself felt at the ballot box if people are given the chance to vote their consciences. Radicals and militants, she says, recalling the fate of the moderate Mensheviks at the hands of the Bolsheviks in 1917, "are not enough to tilt an election. But they are enough to unleash against the population, to rig an election, to kidnap police, to kill the army, and therefore to make it possible to take over the state."
Ms. Bhutto plans to return to Pakistan quite soon, perhaps within a matter of weeks. She worries that Mr. Musharraf could have her arrested, or that he will declare a state of emergency (as it seems he was nearly prepared to do this week), or that he will use brazen or subtle methods to rig the elections. She is plainly confident that her party will score big at the polls if given a fair chance, and that, whether as prime minister or from behind the scenes, she will be at its helm. In a life marked by the sharpest reversals of fortune, it's another turn of, and at, the wheel.
Mr. Stephens writes "Global View," The Wall Street Journal's foreign affairs column.
