Bhutto and Corruption

I've linked to John Burns' lengthy 1998 Benazir Bhutto profile for The New York Times before, but since she's back in the news here it is again. It makes clear that her corruption (and that of her husband, nicknamed "Mr. Ten Percent") wasn't run-of-the-mill developing world graft, but really big-time stuff by Pakistani standards.

I don't mean to just harp on the failings of the dead, and political assassinations of this sort are a horrible thing, but it's not a good idea for western journalists to get into the habit of lionizing massively corrupt politicians just because they worked on the Crimson (I seem to recall that Pol Pot went to a fancy western university while Abraham Lincoln was self-taught). Michael Hirsch says "In the end, Benazir Bhutto could become in death the kind of hero for democracy in Pakistan that she never quite became in life." Maybe so.

Comments

You may want to link to Robert Fisk's reporting. He knows a bit about reporting from Pakistan.

Excerpt. Follow link for full article.

Robert Fisk: They don't blame al-Qa'ida. They blame Musharraf

The Independent, London, 29 December 2007

Weird, isn't it, how swiftly the narrative is laid down for us. Benazir Bhutto, the courageous leader of the Pakistan People's Party, is assassinated in Rawalpindi – attached to the very capital of Islamabad wherein ex-General Pervez Musharraf lives – and we are told by George Bush that her murderers were "extremists" and "terrorists". Well, you can't dispute that.

But the implication of the Bush comment was that Islamists were behind the assassination. It was the Taliban madmen again, the al-Qa'ida spider who struck at this lone and brave woman who had dared to call for democracy in her country.

Of course, given the childish coverage of this appalling tragedy – and however corrupt Ms Bhutto may have been, let us be under no illusions that this brave lady is indeed a true martyr – it's not surprising that the "good-versus-evil" donkey can be trotted out to explain the carnage in Rawalpindi.

Who would have imagined, watching the BBC or CNN on Thursday, that her two brothers, Murtaza and Shahnawaz, hijacked a Pakistani airliner in 1981 and flew it to Kabul where Murtaza demanded the release of political prisoners in Pakistan. Here, a military officer on the plane was murdered. There were Americans aboard the flight – which is probably why the prisoners were indeed released...

...Towards the end of [a] report [released just last week], Tariq Ali dwelt at length on the subsequent murder of Murtaza Bhutto by police close to his home at a time when Benazir was prime minister – and at a time when Benazir was enraged at Murtaza for demanding a return to PPP values and for condemning Benazir's appointment of her own husband as minister for industry, a highly lucrative post.

...Yesterday, our television warriors informed us the PPP members shouting that Musharraf was a "murderer" were complaining he had not provided sufficient security for Benazir. Wrong. They were shouting this because they believe he killed her.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article3291600.ece

Posted by El Cid | December 29, 2007 2:55 PM

She might very well become a hero for democracy (she probably already has). The kind of democracy associated with lawlessness & corruption.

Posted by abb1 | December 29, 2007 2:58 PM

I never understood why our foreign policy with respect to Pakistan was that an authoritarian military dictator was ok, but if he lost control our second choice was the world's most notorious somewhat democratically elected kleptocrat.

Bhutto's assassination may be a bad thing, but her death isn't. Had she died of natural causes it would have been, under a sane administration, a cause for popping corks over at the State Department. In life Bhutto was a truly horrible person and a thoroughly destabilizing force in Pakistan. Bhutto's death is far and away the most respectable thing she accomplished in her life.

Posted by R Johnston | December 29, 2007 3:07 PM

Ralph Peters, a former Army intelligence officer with experience in Pakistan, isn't among the journalists seduced by Bhutto's education. See his NY Post column yesterday, "THE BHUTTO ASSASSINATION: NOT WHAT SHE SEEMED TO BE". An excerpt:

FOR the next several days, you're going to read and hear a great deal of pious nonsense in the wake of the assassination of Pakistan's former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto.

Her country's better off without her. She may serve Pakistan better after her death than she did in life.

We need have no sympathy with her Islamist assassin and the extremists behind him to recognize that Bhutto was corrupt, divisive, dishonest and utterly devoid of genuine concern for her country.

She was a splendid con, persuading otherwise cynical Western politicians and "hardheaded" journalists that she was not only a brave woman crusading in the Islamic wilderness, but also a thoroughbred democrat.

In fact, Bhutto was a frivolously wealthy feudal landlord amid bleak poverty. The scion of a thieving political dynasty, she was always more concerned with power than with the wellbeing of the average Pakistani. Her program remained one of old-school patronage, not increased productivity or social decency.

Educated in expensive Western schools, she permitted Pakistan's feeble education system to rot - opening the door to Islamists and their religious schools.

During her years as prime minister, Pakistan went backward, not forward. Her husband looted shamelessly and ended up fleeing the country, pursued by the courts. The Islamist threat - which she artfully played both ways - spread like cancer.

But she always knew how to work Westerners - unlike the hapless Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who sought the best for his tormented country but never knew how to package himself.

Posted by Fred | December 29, 2007 3:17 PM

Is it only obvious to me that her choosing to return to Pakistan, to her easily foreseeable death, speaks to her being motivated by something other than graft?

Posted by neil | December 29, 2007 4:05 PM

If the righties, as exemplified by Fred above, think of Benazir as a con, they should be more concerned about Mr. Pakistani con extraordinnaire himself, the President of Pakistan.

Posted by gregor | December 29, 2007 4:06 PM

Having been one of the commenters here pointing to Benazir's extraordinary corruption, as well as to her possible role in killing her brother, Murtaza, I think it's only fair to link to obituary in The Nation by Moni Mohsin, a Pakistani novelist:

Despite her failings, she will be sorely missed at a time when Pakistan needs unifying, far-sighted national leaders. She was a woman of great courage and political shrewdness, with a firm grasp of geopolitical realities and global economic imperatives. Alone among the entire democratic leadership of Pakistan, she understood the grave threat the country faced from religious extremists. And in an atmosphere of extreme hostility and suspicion towards America, she was brave enough to articulate that it was not just America's war on terror but ours as well. She knew the risks and had already survived one bloody attack on her life. But in continuing to campaign openly, she refused to be cowed by extremists. Despite repeated warnings from military intelligence and her own oft-stated fears of assassination by Islamists, she was determined to confront this genie. In this final confrontation, there was a neat coincidence between her feudal patrimony ("It is my land") and her democratic values. Flawed, she still represented the best secular option for breaching Pakistan's multiple provincial, linguistic, ethnic, and social fissures. We will miss her.

Posted by Peter H | December 29, 2007 4:27 PM

If the righties, as exemplified by Fred above, think of Benazir as a con, they should be more concerned about Mr. Pakistani con extraordinnaire himself, the President of Pakistan.

Posted by gregor | December 29, 2007 4:36 PM

That some self-declared "westernized" Cambridge-educated Pakistani intellectual will miss her doesn't mean much. If anything, it's probably a good indication that most of the ordinary people won't.

Posted by abb1 | December 29, 2007 4:39 PM

Everyone knows Blue Pakistan isn't real Pakistan anyway.

Posted by neil | December 29, 2007 5:00 PM

unlike the hapless Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who sought the best for his tormented country but never knew how to package himself.

Wow, that's a pretty favorable spin of Musharraf by Ralph Peters.

Posted by Ronnie Pudding | December 29, 2007 5:03 PM

Westerners need to learn that what places like Pakistan needs is not democracy, but rather freedom.

A corrupt, repressive democracy does nothing for human rights. The goal is not democracy. It is human rights. Democracy promotion as it exists now winds up being a huge distraction from the real goal of liberalizing repressive governments.

Posted by bubba | December 29, 2007 5:11 PM

They need neither democracy nor freedom. It's not even possible to define what 'freedom' means. Freedom for whom? to do what?

What they need is independence and then gradual evolution; to be left alone to develop at their own pace.

Posted by abb1 | December 29, 2007 5:31 PM

Semi-OT: (via alicublog.com) Pakistani author Dr. Afral Mirza has a review of an old Strobe Talbott book that has some amazing details of the relationship between Bill Clinton and Nawaz Sharif. I think the Clinton relationship to Pakistan and the players deserves A LOT more focus. Hillary Clinton going to Pakistan as First Lady hardly captures the whole picture like, say, President Clinton going to visit Musharraf six months after he staged a coup.

AQ Khan
Al-Qaeda
Bhutto
the first "Islamic" Atomic bomb test
Clinton/Blair questionable dealings with Pakistan power companies (per Greg Palast)
Sharif's brokering of a peace agreement with India
Musharraf's trashing of same

There is A LOT of critical threads of geopolitics that run through Pakistan and it's not just the Bush Adminsitration that made a botch of it in the region.

Posted by joejoejoe | December 29, 2007 5:35 PM

Is it impossible for flawed people to occassionally do good and useful things?

In Indonesia Suharto et al were corrupt; Suharto's wife, Ibu Tien was, often called Ibu Ten Percent--not unlike B Bhutto's husband. But that only made the Suharto regime ambiguous if also often unpleasant.

A set of question. Does anyone responding to MY above actually know any Pakistanis? Have they ever been to Pakistan, as opposed to knowing about Pakistan through our press? Have they ever actually thought about how American responses to the non-alligned movement (hence India) lead to not so wonderful policy toward the sub-continent and Pakistan's military?

All these questions are naive, and in that sense, serious?

Posted by djeri | December 29, 2007 5:44 PM

Rice got Bhutto killed. Rare indeed does a government policy end in so spectacular a failure as having the bloody brains blown out of a former and potentially future head of state before millions of onlookers. It was in the name of the State Department's "Freedom and Democracy" agenda that Rice first conceived of the purely cosmetic notion of having the telegenic and politically pliable Bhutto pose as the duly elected spokesmodel, for what was to remain a brutal, military tyranny directed by the US to root out, torture, and exterminate every deemed pro-Taliban/Al-Queda lifeform in Pakistan from lizard up. Even in an Administration infamous for using plausible gullibility to exonerate its members from personal responsibility and guilt for catastrophic failures, surely this last, in a long, long line, of world historical blunders should compel that rarest of occasions in the Bush White House, a resignation for failure. Rice has got to go.

As one looks back on the unremitting gross blunders of this White House, the offical media narrative designed to minimize personal liability has always featured the supposed rivalry between the Pentagon and State for control of America's agenda abroad. The subvertion of the State Department by Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and their neocon cohorts in the Pentagon with respect to the prosecution and management of America's ridiculous "War on Terror" and the fraudulent Iraq War is well documented. The horrendous fiascoes, and more importantly, the personal embarassment, which resulted led to the political necessity of re-establishing some semblance of authority and control to formulate and implement foreign policy at State. Thus, the Department was butressed with the appointment of a man with undoubted gravitas and authority, and with a long record of dirty deeds for further credibility, to work beside Condoleeza Rice, namely John Negroponte.

In contradistinction to the Pentagon's eternal reply to, what LBJ onced complained of, was for every foreign policy conundrum, specifically "Bomb! Bomb! Bomb!", Rice's State Department appeared to be the only entity on the face of the planet to take seriously the Bush alibi and mantra of "Freedom and Democracy". And no where was America's insistence that all of the blood spilt and money spent was done for "Freedom and Democracy" more utterly exposed for the ugly truth of its detestable hypocrisy than in Pakistan. In cruel contrast to all of the sanctimonious talk of reversing America's traditional support of the most vicious of tinpot dictators and their tyrannical regimes with Bush's Born Again inspiration for freedom-lovin' people all around the world, oft-quoted to justify our recent relish for criminality, there stood the spectre of our active support for General Pervez Musharaff, our "most important ally in America's War on Terror", with his guns and ammo, tanks and torturers, who toppled a civillian government legally elected in a peaceful and ordered way by a nation of 130,000,000 people. Yet, even he was aware of the bad optics of it all. Thus, he claimed, he promised, he decried, he re-promised, he swore, he warned, he guaranteed, he apologized, he excused, and for over 8 years, he sat on top. But at the end of the day, when he had played all of his cards, with an American ace in his back pocket, he was still in danger of being trumped by his enemies, and far worse than any fantastical Taliban or mythical Al-Queda conspiracy, stood his greatest enemy: the people of Pakistan. Thus, he suspended, he declared, he abolished, he imprisoned, and in the end, he assassinated. And with that ace still in his pocket, he continues to sit on top.

Dr. Condoleeza Rice, once a limp academic and present Bush sycophant, after suffering personal ignominy and public ridicule for her strangely dyslexic command of her portfolios, took over the reigns of the State Department. She disappointed no one with a repeat perfomance of utterly ineffectual stewartship, her chief accomplishment being little else but the accumulation of frequent flyer points. And so in watching the time run out in this her last stint in the vainglorious sunshine of power and celebrity, where shopping for shoes or scolding a clerk made her more headlines than her foreign policy, she seized a last chance for redemption and gratitiude from her host ego, George Bush, by thinking up a way to put a smiley face over the glowering scowl of Musharaff, in the vain hope that the hopelessly naive, i.e. the people of Pakistan, would fall in love with its perfect makeup, its perfect hair and its oh so western love for conspicuous consumption. That face was Benazir Bhutto.

And so, as only the truly empowered and enrich can do, with nary a care or concern for principles, or victims, Condoleeza Rice began to play house with real people, a Paris Hilton on steroids. In collusion with Negroponte, her chaperon, and Gordon Brown, her footman, the plot was hatched: foist a corrupt and reliable figurehead upon a gullible electorate, get it voted in by hook or crook, ensure it abides by any marching orders emanating from DC, and keep it happy like a Digimon with regular feeding and affection until we can can all flee the jurisdiction this January, 2009 with our amnesties, pardons and most importantly, our contracts intact.

Yet alas, this 54-year-old smiley face came with wrinkles, and to be rude, specifically $1.5 billion-dollar wrinkles, tucked away in various Swiss bank accounts, chiefly embezzled from the horrendously impoverished people of Pakistan. Let no one dare doubt the plaintive professions of love for her people, the regular declamations of the evil of Musharaff, the tireless tirades against the terrorist Taliban, versus the nice Taliban of yesteryear she supported when last in power, all voiced in that perfectly cadenced politician's cant, bred by the best bastions of olde English imperialism: Oxford AND Cambridge. But what money don't buy, she don't need. Hence, the awkward need for an amnesty from a compliant judiciary. For Condy, it would just not do to have Benazhir's trademark glasses and many flounces of fabric flying over who gets the top bunk with an Islamabad hooker in a Pakistani correctional facility ("The people of Pakistan demand I get it!"). Enter Musharaff.

From Vietnam, through Iran to Iraq unto Pakistan: as every deposed US-backed dictator in the history of the post-WW II world would ruefully report, once that proverbial American ace in the back pocket is withdrawn, you may as well pack your bags and start googling all countries with air conditioning and no extradiction treaties. Musharaff knows as well as any corporate shyster how to do "the Google", but he would much rather stay at home than absquatulate to a foreign jurisdiction. Hence, one amnesty coming rightup, Ms. Rice. Presto, the National Reconciliation Ordinance, shoved through an obeisant legislature and soon to be ratified by a "new and improved" Pakistani Supreme Court. And in keeping with the spirit of the matter, Musharaff expanded the amnesty to cover not just the innocent Bhutto, but heavens to betsy, everyone everywhere who at anytime embezzled funds from the people of Pakistan, the vast majority being former members of its military: can a silver lining have a silver lining?
Yet in spite of all of these machinations, truth has a terrible way of interfering with the plans of mice and men, and women. Bhutto was never as popular as her own press releases alleged. Indeed, local polling put her rival, Nazwar Sharif, ahead. Revelations concerning the much vilified amnesty, which legalised grand larceny upon some of the poorest people in the world, knocked down her numbers, and fatally destroyed any legitimacy she might have otherwise held. Furthermore, suspicions concerning both her collusion in an American-brokered deal with Mushraraff, and her ultimate loyalty, alienated much of her base.

Bhutto was yet another wayward vulture who got too close to the corpse on which Pakistan's generals were dining.

Ms. Rice has failed in her mad experiment to revive this Pakistani Frankenstein to decorate the already politically dead corpse of the Musharaff regime. She failed us with 911, she failed us with the Iraq War, and now, most dangerously, she has failed us in Pakistan.

Posted by NeoCynic | December 29, 2007 5:56 PM

Quoth Fred, quoting Ralph Peters: "...unlike the hapless Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who sought the best for his tormented country but never knew how to package himself."

Er, this would be the same General Musharraf who was trading quips with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show less than six months ago, no? Say what you will about him, Musharraf has never lacked for telegenic apologists in the US media, not to mention the Bush administration.

That all said, I suspect that Ms. Bhutto's legacy is one of those areas where, bluster aside, the left and right (or at least some good plurality of both) in the US are basically in agreement: since her agenda for Pakistan didn't extend much past her personal enrichment, she made for an objectively terrible leader no matter what your political desires regarding Pakistan might be.

Posted by Doctor Memory | December 29, 2007 6:23 PM

...it's not a good idea for western journalists to get into the habit of lionizing massively corrupt politicians just because...

Bwahaahaaaaa

Posted by scudbucket | December 29, 2007 7:18 PM

Footnote: It was Khieu Samphan, the Khmer Rouge economic minister -- not Pol Pot -- who not only attended the Sorbonne but first designed the Khmer Rouge's "Empty the Cities" policy as his successful doctoral thesis there in 1964. Another little reminder that Ideas Have Consequences, and that the only thing even worse than an intellectual tyrant is a non-intellectual one.

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | December 29, 2007 7:19 PM

Bruce Moomaw: That's why some people try to blame the Khmer Rouge atrocities on "French culture" and "French intellectuals," but never seem to similarly recall the near decade of US bombing and carpet bombing of Cambodia's peasant population in assigning blame for the rise of the KR.

Posted by El Cid | December 29, 2007 7:50 PM

"Is it only obvious to me that her choosing to return to Pakistan, to her easily foreseeable death, speaks to her being motivated by something other than graft?"

I'd say the motivation was clearly MORE power and MORE graft.

There's an article over at Counterpunch that identifies her with Indira Ghandi as basically their father's sock puppets. They were born and bred to seize power, and they obsessed over their fathers ends, and they obsessed over retaining and grabbing more power.

There's a story I read somewhere of someone who actually met Bhutto when she was a young girl attending a Western college, and that person said that even then she KNEW that she would rule her country and she conducted herself accordingly.

Someone that focused on being a ruler will do anything to get back into power, including risk assassination.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 29, 2007 9:33 PM

That's how desperate Pakistan must be in: that Bhutto was considered their best hope. Depressing.

How the hell Pakistan will remain stable after all this is beyond me.

Posted by Davidson | December 29, 2007 10:29 PM

Might as well just post the second half of that Peters column here, since it fleshes out Peters's perspective on Musharraf and addresses some of the comments raised here:

Military regimes are never appealing to Western sensibilities. Yet, there are desperate hours when they provide the only, slim hope for a country nearing collapse. Democracy is certainly preferable - but, unfortunately, it's not always immediately possible. Like spoiled children, we have to have it now - and damn the consequences.

In Pakistan, the military has its own forms of graft; nonetheless, it remains the least corrupt institution in the country and the only force holding an unnatural state together. In Pakistan back in the '90s, the only people I met who cared a whit about the common man were military officers.

Americans don't like to hear that. But it's the truth.

Bhutto embodied the flaws in Pakistan's political system, not its potential salvation. Both she and her principal rival, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, failed to offer a practical vision for the future - their political feuds were simply about who would divvy up the spoils.

From its founding, Pakistan has been plagued by cults of personality, by personal, feudal loyalties that stymied the development of healthy government institutions (provoking coups by a disgusted military). When she held the reins of government, Bhutto did nothing to steer in a new direction - she merely sought to enhance her personal power.

Now she's dead. And she may finally render her country a genuine service (if cynical party hacks don't try to blame Musharraf for their own benefit). After the inevitable rioting subsides and the spectacular conspiracy theories cool a bit, her murder may galvanize Pakistanis against the Islamist extremists who've never gained great support among voters, but who nonetheless threaten the state's ability to govern.

As a victim of fanaticism, Bhutto may shine as a rallying symbol with a far purer light than she cast while alive. The bitter joke is that, while she was never serious about freedom, women's rights and fighting terrorism, the terrorists took her rhetoric seriously - and killed her for her words, not her actions.

Nothing's going to make Pakistan's political crisis disappear - this crisis may be permanent, subject only to intermittent amelioration. (Our State Department's policy toward Islamabad amounts to a pocket full of platitudes, nostalgia for the 20th century and a liberal version of the white man's burden mindset.)

The one slim hope is that this savage murder will - in the long term - clarify their lot for Pakistan's citizens. The old ways, the old personalities and old parties have failed them catastrophically. The country needs new leaders - who don't think an election victory entitles them to grab what little remains of the national patrimony.

In killing Bhutto, the Islamists over-reached (possibly aided by rogue elements in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, one of the murkiest outfits on this earth). Just as al Qaeda in Iraq overplayed its hand and alienated that country's Sunni Arabs, this assassination may disillusion Pakistanis who lent half an ear to Islamist rhetoric.

A creature of insatiable ambition, Bhutto will now become a martyr. In death, she may pay back some of the enormous debt she owes her country.

Posted by Fred | December 30, 2007 12:24 AM

"In Pakistan, the military has its own forms of graft; nonetheless, it remains the least corrupt institution in the country and the only force holding an unnatural state together."

Well, that blew any credibility Stevens might have had, despite his likely being correct in his overall assessment of the situation.

Not to mention that his assumption that Bhutto's killers were Al Qaeda appear to be ignored by Bhutto's followers, who are blaming Musharraf directly.

It's disingenuous to say that the military is "holding the country together" if it is at the same time the primary reason why the country is falling apart - as just about every Pakistan expert appears to believe.

Just about every Pakistan expert I've read believes that the military needs to be removed from the picture and reduced to doing what a military is supposed to do - defend the country. I assume that said experts are perfectly well aware that Pakistan's political parties don't seem to be up to the task of replacing the military control of the country with their own. But in that case, the country might as well fall apart and then come back together again under different circumstances.

This notion of trying to hold back history by supporting military control of a government has been a non-starter in just about every region of the world. I don't see it as any more justified in Pakistan, just because they have nukes.

If a country can't be rationally governed without relying on who has the most guns and tanks, that country is already a failed state - and its collapse is inevitable, whether slowly or quickly.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 30, 2007 2:05 AM

Matt -- I don't have any ponies in this particular race, but I couldn't help but notice that Jeff Gerth contributed to that Burns article. Which leaves me feeling icky. I'm more interested in what Fisk has to say...

Posted by PartisanJ | December 30, 2007 7:42 AM