NY Times Book Review of "Reconciliation"

[johnkarls]

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New York Times – Published Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Unshakable Optimist of the House of Bhutto
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Benazir Bhutto called her 1989 autobiography “Daughter of Destiny,” and when she was assassinated in December at 54, she became the fourth member of her immediate family to die violently against the backdrop of Pakistani intrigue and politics: her father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in 1979 on charges of having ordered the murder of a minor political opponent; her younger brother, Shahnawaz, mysteriously died of poisoning in 1985; and her other brother, Murtaza, was gunned down outside his home in 1996.

The head of the populist Pakistan Peoples Party, Ms. Bhutto was herself a charismatic and polarizing figure, who ran as a representative of democratic hopes, and her death underscored the instability of Pakistan — a nuclear-armed country deemed by many as the most dangerous place in the world — and the precarious state of politics in that nation, which headed to the polls on Monday in a vote that will determine the next prime minister.

In Ms. Bhutto’s new book, “Reconciliation,” a volume she finished days before she was killed, she lays out her vision of Islam as “an open, pluralistic and tolerant religion” that she says has been hijacked by extremists, and her belief that Islam and the West need not be headed on a collision course toward a “clash of civilizations.”

If Ms. Bhutto’s own life reads like a Greek tragedy, she was nonetheless a very modern politician, and the book she has written is part manifesto, part spin job, part selective history and part term-paper analysis. It shows Ms. Bhutto in the many guises the public in both the West and her native Pakistan came to know: an Oxford-educated debate champion, adept at invoking Spengler and T. S. Eliot to make her points; a savvy and self-dramatizing campaigner, adroit at charming members of the Washington power elite as well as the disenfranchised poor in Pakistan, whom she pledged to represent; a determined heir to her father’s political legacy, who found duty turning over “years of pain, suffering, sacrifice and separation” into “an all consuming passion.”

After a privileged childhood and a Western education at Radcliffe and Oxford, Pinkie, as Ms. Bhutto was known in her youth, returned home to Pakistan where her father was arrested by Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq in 1977. In “Reconciliation” Ms. Bhutto writes: “On the day my father was arrested, I changed from a girl to a woman. He would guide me over the next two years, cautioning me to remain focused and committed and never bitter. On the day he was murdered I understood that my life was to be Pakistan, and I accepted the mantle of leadership of my father’s legacy and my father’s party.”

As head of the Pakistan Peoples Party, Ms. Bhutto was twice elected prime minister and twice expelled from office under charges of corruption, and she spent many years in exile abroad (in addition to some five years in prison and under house arrest). Her return to Pakistan in October 2007 was marked by terrible violence — at least 134 of her supporters were killed, and some 400 were wounded in bombings — that would prove to be a harrowing foreshadowing of the violence that took her life two months later.

It is Ms. Bhutto’s contention in this book that dictatorship breeds extremism and that democracies — and here, she sounds a lot like President Bush — “do not go to war with democracies” and “do not become state sponsors of terrorism.” She quotes passages from the Koran in support of her argument that Islam preaches tolerance and pluralism (“You shall have your religion, and I shall have my religion”), and she compares Osama bin Laden’s “attempt to exploit, manipulate and militarize Islam” to terrorist acts committed by other religious fanatics: “whether Christian fundamentalists’ attacks on women’s reproductive clinics or Jewish fundamentalist attacks on Muslim holy sites in Palestine.”

Much of “Reconciliation” consists of history lessons, delivered from Ms. Bhutto’s own unique perspective, about conflicting interpretations of Islamic doctrine, the Shia-Sunni schism and the debilitating legacy of Western colonialism in the Middle East. Ms. Bhutto takes the United States to task for its role in helping to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953, arguing that this not only undermined the future of democratic government in that nation but also “made generations of Muslims suspicious and cynical about Western motivations.”

She says that if the United States had not used Afghanistan as merely a “blunt instrument to trigger the implosion of the Soviet Union” and then abandoned it, history in the entire region might well have been very different. And she deems Iraq “a quagmire for the West and a great and unfolding tragedy for the people” of that country — a “colonial war in a postcolonial era” from which America cannot extricate itself.

When it comes to Pakistani history and her own role in it, Ms. Bhutto’s account is considerably more problematic. She asserts that if her government “had continued for its full five-year term, it would have been difficult for Osama bin Laden to set up base in Afghanistan in 1997 when he established Al Qaeda to openly recruit and train young men from all over the Muslim world.” Never mind that it was on her watch that the shadowy Pakistani intelligence service began actively promoting the Taliban in Afghanistan and recruiting young Islamic militants for its continuing struggle against India in Kashmir. Grandly equating herself with democracy in Pakistan, Ms. Bhutto also writes, “In 1998, two years after my overthrow, Al Qaeda declared war on America,” and suggests that “the age of international terrorist war actually coincided with the suspension of democracy in Pakistan.”

Also sprinkled throughout this book are accusations against the current Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, with whom she had reportedly been negotiating a power-sharing arrangement, promoted by the United States. Ms. Bhutto blames Mr. Musharraf’s government for allowing a Taliban resurgence by pulling its own military out from North Waziristan in 2006. She writes that there were reports of “wide-spread rigging preparations” for the 2008 elections. And she accuses Mr. Musharraf’s supporters of doing little to provide adequate security for her return to the country in the fall of 2007, accusations that would be revived by her supporters in the wake of her assassination.

Certainly she knew the risks of returning from exile. “I would have done anything to spare my children the same pain that I had undergone — and still feel — at my father’s death,” she writes. “But this was actually one thing I couldn’t do; I couldn’t retreat from the party and the platform that I had given so much of my life to.”

Her platform, laid out in this volume as democracy in Pakistan and a vision of reconciliation between the Muslim world and the West, was an optimistic one in which globalization promotes tolerance, not resentment, and in which “modernization and extremism are contradictory and mutually exclusive.” It was a platform deeply shaken by her own untimely death.