Martyr Without a Cause

By William Dalrymple

Benazir Bhutto's assassination is a body blow to the troubled but strategically vital state of Pakistan. It removes from the scene a secular, liberal, pro-Western leader. It gives momentum to Pakistan's jihadis in their campaign to Talibanize the country, and it edges Pakistan closer toward Islamic revolution. Her death is also, of course, a tragedy for her family, including the three children she leaves motherless. But the horror of Bhutto's end should not blind us to her mediocre legacy, and it is misleading to depict her as any sort of martyr for freedom and democracy.

Bhutto's instincts were highly autocratic. Within her Pakistan People's Party, she had herself declared the lifetime president and refused to let her brother Mir Murtaza challenge her for its leadership. He was shot dead by police officers while Benazir was Prime Minister; his wife Ghinwa and daughter Fatima believe Benazir was complicit in having him killed. She colluded in wider human-rights abuses. Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, abductions, killings and torture.

Far from reforming herself in exile, Bhutto, as recently as this fall, kept a studied distance from the lawyers' movement that led the civil protests against President Pervez Musharraf's unconstitutional attempts to manipulate the Supreme Court. She also sidelined those in her party who supported the lawyers. Later, she said nothing to stop Musharraf from ordering the expulsion of Nawaz Sharif to Saudi Arabia, which removed from the election her most formidable democratic opponent. Many of her supporters regarded her deal with Musharraf as a betrayal of all her party stood for. Her final act, in her will, was to hand her party to her husband, as if it were her personal family fief.

Bhutto was a notably inept administrator. During her first, 20-month premiership, she failed to pass a single piece of major legislation, and during her two periods in power, she did almost nothing to help the liberal causes she espoused so enthusiastically to the Western media. Instead, it was under her watch that Pakistan's secret service, the ISI, helped arm the Taliban and facilitate its rise to power in Afghanistan. And she did nothing to rein in the agency's disastrous policy of training Islamist jihadis to do the ISI's dirty work elsewhere. As a young correspondent covering the conflict in Kashmir in the late 1980s and early '90s, I saw how, during her premiership, Pakistan sidelined the Kashmiris' secular resistance movement and instead gave aid and training to the brutal Islamist groups created and controlled by the government. Had Bhutto taken a more robust stance toward the jihadis her intelligence services were patronizing, it is quite possible that 9/11 would never have happened--and she would still be alive.

Bhutto was above all a feudal landowner (her family had a lot of property in Sindh province) with the sense of entitlement this produced. Democracy has never thrived in Pakistan in part because landowning remains the base from which politicians emerge. Pakistani democracy is really a form of elective feudalism. Bhutto nominated her feudal friends and allies for seats, and these landowners made sure their peasants voted them in.

Behind Pakistan's swings between military government and democracy lies a continuity of elitist interests: to some extent, Pakistan's industrial, military and landowning classes are all interrelated, and they look after one another. They do not, however, do much for the poor. The government education system barely functions in Pakistan, and for the have-nots, justice is almost impossible to come by. This pushes the poor into the arms of fundamentalists.

Western commentators tend to see political Islam as an antiliberal and irrational form of "Islamo-fascism." Yet much of the Islamists' success in Pakistan and elsewhere comes from their ability to portray themselves as champions of social justice, fighting Westernized elites--like Benazir Bhutto. Her reputation for corruption was gold dust to these Islamic revolutionaries, just as the excesses of the Shah were to his opponents in Iran 30 years earlier. During Bhutto's government, Pakistan was declared one of the most corrupt nations in the world, and she and her husband Asif Ali Zardari were charged with jointly laundering no less than $1.5 billion through Swiss bank accounts. (The charges against Zardari still stand.)

Corruption among the elite and the failure of the state to provide justice and the most basic necessities for the poor are two of the principal reasons for the rise of the Islamists in Pakistan. They are the only force capable of taking on the country's landowners and their military cousins. That is why, in recent elections, the Islamists have hugely increased their share of the vote and why they now control much of the west of the country. Benazir Bhutto was a brave, gutsy, secular and liberal woman. But she was a central part of Pakistan's problems, not a solution to them.

Dalrymple's latest book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857, was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for history