Bhutto and Pakistan: moderate martyrs and other myths

Reinhold Niebuhr - a man who in his time beat that well-worn intellectual path from the authoritarian left to the authoritarian right - argued that since "rationality belongs [only] to the cool observers", "the stupidity of the average man" meant that the former should spoon-feed the latter with "emotionally potent oversimplifications" to render the dim proletarian docile and pliant. To this day, the Western power-centres to whom Niebuhr gravitated employ those same "emotionally potent oversimplifications" in shaping public discourse to suit their interests. Understanding and challenging power means being able to identify and pick apart those rhetorical devices wherever they arise.

Reacting to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto last week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that the Pakistan People's Party leader had been "assassinated by cowards afraid of democracy" adding that "terrorists must not be allowed to kill democracy in Pakistan". US President George Bush said "The United States strongly condemns this cowardly act by murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan's democracy". French President Nicholas Sarkozy said that "terrorism and violence have no place in the democratic debate and the combat of ideas and programmes". The Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh said that "the subcontinent has lost an outstanding leader who worked for democracy and reconciliation in her country". A simple narrative was affirmed and reinforced through repetition by one august commentator after another: Bhutto = moderation and democracy, as opposed to its evil antagonist "extremism", which much not be allowed to prevail.

Brown was of course right to say that "Benazir Bhutto was a woman of immense personal courage and bravery. Knowing as she did the threats to her life, and the previous attempt at assassination [she had nevertheless returned to Pakistan]". Bhutto's killing can only be lamented, for the tragedy of the loss of her life and those others killed in the attack, for the tragedies of those deaths that followed in the ensuing violence, and for all the resulting suffering that has yet to come. But the simplistic presentation of Bhutto as a martyr to liberalism, "moderation" and democracy, who died fighting "extremists", cannot be accepted. For one thing it is, at the least, an extremely problematic oversimplification. But more importantly, since we in the West are active participants in Pakistan's ongoing crisis, misunderstandings of this situation on our part will continue to result in policy choices that negatively impact on the people of Pakistan in the future. It is no exaggeration therefore to say that lives depend on us dispensing with "emotionally potent oversimplifications" and instead turning our attention to the facts.

The moderate vs extremist dichotomy obscures far more than it explains. William Dalrymple notes that the grip on power exerted by the feudal landowning classes of which Bhutto was a member has done as much as religious extremism or the role of the army, if not more, to undermine democracy in Pakistan: "real democracy has never thrived in Pakistan, in part because landowning remains the principle social base from which politicians emerge". Dalrymple quotes "writer Ahmed Rashid [saying that]: 'In some constituencies, if the feudals put up their dog as a candidate, that dog would get elected with 99 per cent of the vote.'"

"Benazir was the person", Dalrymple continues "who brought Pakistan's strange variety of democracy, really a form of 'elective feudalism', into disrepute [which in turn] helped fuel the current, apparently unstoppable, growth of the Islamists....[who] successfully depict [the feudal elite] as rich, corrupt, decadent and Westernised...During her government, the anti-corruption organisation Transparency International named Pakistan one of the three most corrupt countries in the world. Bhutto and her husband, Asif Zardari, widely known as 'Mr 10 Per Cent', faced allegations of plundering the country. Charges were filed in Pakistan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States to investigate their various bank accounts."

From the highest offices of desperately poor Pakistan, hundreds of millions were apparently swindled. While most of her compatriots languished in destitution (between 1995 and 2000, 38 per cent of Pakistani children under 5 were underweight), Bhutto - "a feudal princess with [an] aristocratic sense of entitlement" - lived in the vast surrounds of "a giddy, pseudo-Mexican ranch [where] crystal chandeliers dangled sometimes two or three to a room", quoting Dalrymple. For himself, Zardari acquired a £4.3 million estate in Surrey, which could no doubt have bought one or two square meals for the malnourished infants of Pakistan.

In power, Dalrymple notes, "Amnesty International accused [Bhutto's] government of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, killings and torture". More sinister still are allegations made by many, including her niece, and detailed in Tariq Ali's recent article for the London Review of Books, that Bhutto was involved in the murder of her own brother, who had become a political rival.

Nor should it be forgotten that it was under Bhutto that the Pakistani military and intelligence services helped bring the vicious Taliban government into power in neighbouring Afghanistan, as an exercise in Pakistani power-projection. Bhutto's was one of only a handful of world governments to recognise the "extremist" regime. All in all, the picture of Bhutto the moderate democrat - a latter-day martyr to secularism and modernity - begins to look a little thin under close examination.

As Barnett Rubin - a leading expert on Afghanistan and Pakistan - noted earlier this week: "The Bush administration [and this also applies to many other Western governments, intellectuals and commentators] has decided that in the "Muslim world" a battle is going on between pro-American "moderates" and anti-American "extremists." According to them, the "Muslim world" has a two-party system organized around how Muslims feel about America. In Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf is a "pro-American moderate." Benazir Bhutto is a "pro-American moderate." Therefore it is only logical (and in U.S. interests!) for the U.S. to realign Pakistan politics so that the "moderates" work together against the "extremists.""

In reality, it is these very "moderates" whose venal, corrupt and amoral behaviour creates the conditions - poverty, disenfranchisement and a government in the pocket of foreign powers - that fan the flames of extremism to begin with. Certainly it is more than a little rich for the Western leaders who have enthusiastically backed a military dictatorship in Pakistan since 1999 to talk of their desire to see democracy flourish in that country. Bhutto's return had been a Western-sponsored attempt to prettify the tottering despot Musharraf by engineering an unseemly and decidedly non-democratic power-sharing accommodation between the two. This clumsy attempt to put lipstick on a pig descended into grim farce as Musharraf attempted to minimise his losses by enacting a state of emergency; ostensibly to crack down on extremists but which in fact targeted members of Pakistan's genuinely democratic opposition. As Musharraf sacked the judiciary and replaced them with his own lackeys, the West could only mumble disapproving platitudes (perhaps privately welcoming the resulting strengthening of their pet "moderates"). For Bhutto's part, the Guardian's leader writers commented that "her resistance to Mr Musharraf's attacks on civil society was equivocal. Her demands for the release from house arrest of Pakistan's former chief justice Iftikhar Chaudry were tempered by the knowledge that if the supreme court were restored to its pre-emergency rule state, the amnesty she had obtained from Mr Musharraf would be up for judicial review."

Undermining extremist forms of Islam and terrorist groups whilst bolstering democratic governance are plainly urgent tasks for Pakistan. A yet more urgent task is to deal with the principle obstacles to achieving these goals. One of these is the military/security complex - an institution whose own corruption is epic, whose extensive involvement in nuclear proliferation could yet have catastrophic consequences, which has inflicted dictatorship after dictatorship on Pakistan, which was the perpetrator of the bloodbath in East Pakistan .... and on, and on...and which has enjoyed strong Western backing throughout. The other is the oligarchical/kleptocrat class - hailed as "moderates" and "liberals" by clueless Western governing elites - of which Bhutto was a fully paid-up member.

The current collapse of the West's Pakistan policy shows that there are factors other than our own actions that influence events. But the responsibility to at least do no harm still remains upon us. Forcing our governments to withdraw their support from feudal rule and military despotism will not guarantee that Pakistan is able to find democracy, stability and security. But the effect of our governments' actions to date suggest that a policy-reversal might just give the people of that country a better chance of seeing a way through the current crisis and into a better future. That reversal will not come because democracy and liberty are under threat in Pakistan: the lofty ideals claimed by the West can, quite clearly, not be taken entirely at face value. Only when the power and interests of our governments' are threatened will the course be changed. It therefore falls upon us to raise the political costs of the current policies. Challenging "emotionally potent oversimplifications" and drawing attention to the reality of our involvement in Pakistani affairs, and the real nature of our allies, is an essential first step along that road.