Remembering Benazir Bhutto
JANUARY 6, 2008 TAGS:
By Judy Bachrach
Two years ago in London, I was seated at a dinner table across from Benazir Bhutto. We had met before but not during her glory days when she was Pakistan’s prime minister, eloquent, Harvard-educated, very beautiful, and twice elected. By the time of our dinner she was living in self-imposed exile, a disgraced former leader fearful of imprisonment or worse, should she return to the country of her birth.
Aside from a few forays to her London apartment and to Washington, D.C., Bhutto was living in Dubai with her children and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari. It was frequently suggested that he was responsible for a fair number of her troubles, most notably the allegations of massive corruption that would dog her till her untimely death.
Theirs was an arranged marriage – Bhutto would later defend this practice as being no more bizarre than matchmaking via computer. But the vehemence and passion with which she defended her spouse, a lover of polo, fine food and high living, stunned many of her countrymen. It also led them to question her judgment, as it was during Bhutto’s second administration, from 2003 to 2006, that her husband was made minister of investment. Despite all of Bhutto’s incensed denials, charges were made that because of his illegal dealings the couple had managed to accumulate $1.5 billion. After eight years in prison, Zardari was released on bail in 2004.
Bhutto during our dinner therefore felt there was much to celebrate, yet still not quite enough to suit her. This promising turn of events for which she had worked tirelessly gave her, she felt, some leeway to execute a few interesting political maneuvers and regain control of Pakistan. It was to this end that she had just returned from Washington, where she had attempted to speak to both Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney.
“And?” I asked. “Who did you talk to?”
“Neither one,” she replied despondently. “They simply did not make themselves available. I spoke to a few people lower down in the State Department, and I told them what I thought of President Musharraf and his complete inability to control terrorism and Al Qaeda, but I couldn’t talk to anyone higher up. No one in the administration really wanted to listen to me.
“If America is really committed to this war on terror,” she continued, “they have to understand they can’t manage it with Musharraf still in power.”
She was giving her pitch with some vehemence; it was a practiced performance, the polished work of a politician who deeply disliked Pervez Musharraf and wanted his job. But it was also clear she really believed him to be incompetent. She was looking very tired, I thought; still beautiful, her lips and eyes carefully enhanced by cosmetics. And yet somehow despite these efforts, she seemed depleted. There had been many defeats since she left office. No one, not even a longtime British friend who introduced us, believed she had a chance of returning to power in Pakistan.
I asked her what accounted for Musharraf’s seeming inability to do something about terrorism within his own country.
“Because he doesn’t have the support of his own people,” she replied. “Because no one trusts him to take charge and control forces friendly to either Al Qaeda or the Taliban. He simply doesn’t have the power or the will. And people don’t like him.”
Coming from Bhutto, this was an interesting indictment. It was while she was prime minister, after all, as the author William Dalrymple has pointed out, that Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, “first installed the Taliban in Afghanistan.” It was the Taliban, in turn, that welcomed Al Qaeda to the region and permitted them to train in Afghanistan. If the Bush administration was initially less than enthusiastic about Bhutto’s attempts to return to Pakistan and regain power, perhaps it had its reasons.
But Bhutto had traits her political rival could never hope to acquire: great charm and charisma. Each time I saw her after that dinner she seemed endowed with increasing calm and self-possession, as though something was in the works. With the sheer perseverance that was her trademark, she convinced the reluctant Americans to smooth her path back to her own country. This was to be her triumph – and, as things transpired, her undoing.
In mid-October, when the first suicide attack wrecked Bhutto’s welcome-home celebration, leaving 136 people dead, but Pakistan’s prodigal daughter unscathed, members of Bhutto’s People’s Party immediately placed blame on Musharraf and Al Qaeda. It remains an open question why, in the face of so much evident danger as well as the continued animosity of her country’s intelligence services, Bhutto chose not simply to risk yet again the wrath of assassins – but to double-dare it. Very possibly, she considered that defiance, and its consequences, her ultimate service to her country.
“I had an e-mail from her Christmas Eve and it ended with the words, ‘Keep on praying for me,’” Bhutto’s longtime British friend told me recently. “Strangely, I think she died a very happy woman. She was overjoyed to be back in Pakistan and in the thick of politics and the election campaign. She died at a high point, and ironically her reputation will be increased somewhat through the manner of her death.”
Judy Bachrach is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair.
Two years ago in London, I was seated at a dinner table across from Benazir Bhutto. We had met before but not during her glory days when she was Pakistan’s prime minister, eloquent, Harvard-educated, very beautiful, and twice elected. By the time of our dinner she was living in self-imposed exile, a disgraced former leader fearful of imprisonment or worse, should she return to the country of her birth.
Aside from a few forays to her London apartment and to Washington, D.C., Bhutto was living in Dubai with her children and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari. It was frequently suggested that he was responsible for a fair number of her troubles, most notably the allegations of massive corruption that would dog her till her untimely death.
Theirs was an arranged marriage – Bhutto would later defend this practice as being no more bizarre than matchmaking via computer. But the vehemence and passion with which she defended her spouse, a lover of polo, fine food and high living, stunned many of her countrymen. It also led them to question her judgment, as it was during Bhutto’s second administration, from 2003 to 2006, that her husband was made minister of investment. Despite all of Bhutto’s incensed denials, charges were made that because of his illegal dealings the couple had managed to accumulate $1.5 billion. After eight years in prison, Zardari was released on bail in 2004.
Bhutto during our dinner therefore felt there was much to celebrate, yet still not quite enough to suit her. This promising turn of events for which she had worked tirelessly gave her, she felt, some leeway to execute a few interesting political maneuvers and regain control of Pakistan. It was to this end that she had just returned from Washington, where she had attempted to speak to both Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney.
“And?” I asked. “Who did you talk to?”
“Neither one,” she replied despondently. “They simply did not make themselves available. I spoke to a few people lower down in the State Department, and I told them what I thought of President Musharraf and his complete inability to control terrorism and Al Qaeda, but I couldn’t talk to anyone higher up. No one in the administration really wanted to listen to me.“If America is really committed to this war on terror,” she continued, “they have to understand they can’t manage it with Musharraf still in power.”
She was giving her pitch with some vehemence; it was a practiced performance, the polished work of a politician who deeply disliked Pervez Musharraf and wanted his job. But it was also clear she really believed him to be incompetent. She was looking very tired, I thought; still beautiful, her lips and eyes carefully enhanced by cosmetics. And yet somehow despite these efforts, she seemed depleted. There had been many defeats since she left office. No one, not even a longtime British friend who introduced us, believed she had a chance of returning to power in Pakistan.
I asked her what accounted for Musharraf’s seeming inability to do something about terrorism within his own country.
“Because he doesn’t have the support of his own people,” she replied. “Because no one trusts him to take charge and control forces friendly to either Al Qaeda or the Taliban. He simply doesn’t have the power or the will. And people don’t like him.”
Coming from Bhutto, this was an interesting indictment. It was while she was prime minister, after all, as the author William Dalrymple has pointed out, that Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, “first installed the Taliban in Afghanistan.” It was the Taliban, in turn, that welcomed Al Qaeda to the region and permitted them to train in Afghanistan. If the Bush administration was initially less than enthusiastic about Bhutto’s attempts to return to Pakistan and regain power, perhaps it had its reasons.
But Bhutto had traits her political rival could never hope to acquire: great charm and charisma. Each time I saw her after that dinner she seemed endowed with increasing calm and self-possession, as though something was in the works. With the sheer perseverance that was her trademark, she convinced the reluctant Americans to smooth her path back to her own country. This was to be her triumph – and, as things transpired, her undoing.
In mid-October, when the first suicide attack wrecked Bhutto’s welcome-home celebration, leaving 136 people dead, but Pakistan’s prodigal daughter unscathed, members of Bhutto’s People’s Party immediately placed blame on Musharraf and Al Qaeda. It remains an open question why, in the face of so much evident danger as well as the continued animosity of her country’s intelligence services, Bhutto chose not simply to risk yet again the wrath of assassins – but to double-dare it. Very possibly, she considered that defiance, and its consequences, her ultimate service to her country.
“I had an e-mail from her Christmas Eve and it ended with the words, ‘Keep on praying for me,’” Bhutto’s longtime British friend told me recently. “Strangely, I think she died a very happy woman. She was overjoyed to be back in Pakistan and in the thick of politics and the election campaign. She died at a high point, and ironically her reputation will be increased somewhat through the manner of her death.”
Judy Bachrach is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair.
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