Pakistan’s Bhutto: A Woman or a Purpose Extraordinary
By Cameron Munter, Skytop Contributor / January 10th, 2022
Cameron Munter served as ambassador to Pakistan at the time of the Bin Laden raid. He was ambassador to Serbia during the Kosovo independence crisis. He served twice in Iraq, in Mosul as Provincial Reconstruction Leader and in Baghdad as Deputy Chief of Mission. In the course of three decades as a career diplomat, he was also NSC Director in the Clinton and Bush White Houses, and served overseas in Warsaw, Prague, and Bonn.
Munter studied at Cornell and earned a PhD in history from Johns Hopkins, and has taught at Pomona College, Columbia University School of Law, and UCLA.
Currently a consultant in New York, Munter was President and CEO of the East West Institute, a nonprofit engaged in global conflict prevention. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Diplomacy, and serves on numerous corporate and nonprofit boards.
A Leader Defined by Her Family
What is expected from a woman who is defined by her family, by her ethnicity, by her class, and by her gender? Everything, it turns out, if your name is Benazir Bhutto and you come from a difficult country, Pakistan; and when people expect everything from someone, it’s almost certain to lead to disappointment.
Her Possibilities Were Many
Twice the Prime Minister of Pakistan, she died in December 2007, at a time when Pakistanis – and not a few outside observers – believed she stood on the threshold of greatness. She was assassinated at a political rally in Rawalpindi, and the circumstances of her death are still somewhat murky, and this murkiness dominates the ever-conspiratorial Pakistani public record. But if we step back, we see with a measure of sadness that her possibilities were many, even if her record of achievement was mixed.
A Politician’s Daughter
Bhutto was born in 1953. The daughter of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who was probably the most adept and charismatic politician in Pakistan’s history. Zulfiqar rose from his political base in the southern state of Sindh to find his moment of glory during and after Pakistan’s greatest defeat: its loss of Bangladesh in 1971.
As foreign minister, he was called upon to negotiate the terms of the dismemberment of what had been East Pakistan from the rest of the country, and did so in such a way to gain the respect of friend and foe alike: tough, clear, and compelling, Zulfiqar then went on to become Prime Minister of Pakistan through the 1970s, pushing the country in the direction of then-fashionable socialism (and not a little opportunistic Islamism as well).
So here is how Benazir began: as the privileged daughter of a wealthy provincial magnate, a Sindhi in a country dominated by Punjabis, a landowner in a desperately unequal country, and the intelligent, attractive daughter of an intelligent, attractive leader.
She studied at Harvard (then Radcliffe) in the late 1960s, and then Oxford, making lifelong connections with global elites. She was, at the time, thought to be a mild progressive, perhaps thought by many in the west as their idea of an ideal change agent for a country in need of modernity – or so this rather Orientalist reading might have it. In any event, she was groomed for leadership by her father on her return to Pakistan, but when Zulfiqar was first toppled by a military coup and then executed by the new regime, Benezir’s future looked troubled indeed.
First Female Islamic Prime Minister Facing Formidable Headwinds
She fought back, with foreign support and domestic allies, and after the death in 1988 of Pakistan’s military strongman she emerged as the first female Prime Minister of an Islamic country. Her People’s Party was secular; the expectation was that she would press forward with reforms.
She was feted in Washington in 1989, addressing a joint session of Congress, delivering Harvard’s commencement address. But her stints in power (1988-1990, followed by 1993-1996) were marked by accusations of corruption, and certainly were unable to overcome the enormous challenges of religious and ethnic tensions as well as economic limitations that she faced.
To some, she was charismatic; to others, she was arrogant. To some, she sought reform; to others, she seemed to line her pockets and those of her husband, a businessman whose reputation was one of questionable integrity. She was from a feudal family; she didn’t challenge the grip of the feudals on Pakistani society. Nor was she able to undo the strictly Islamic social structures that had been put in place in the 1980s.
Curse of the Great White Hope
Nonetheless she retained a following, most notably in the west, even as she was exiled and spent the first years of the 21st century outside Pakistan.
Many American leaders still saw her as the great hope for Pakistan, the potential great reformer who understood east and west. She was expected to be a kind of savior, the woman who broke the barriers in a traditional society, the noble who understood noblesse oblige, the woman from a provincial family who would bring modernity to the growing cities of Pakistan.
In other words, the expectations were not far from impossible. But she sought to fulfill them anyway.
Toward the end of the regime of Pervez Musharraf, yet another military leader who had taken charge of Pakistan in a coup at the end of the 1990s, she pushed for a restoration of democracy; and as Musharraf’s effectiveness waned, Pakistanis and foreigners alike looked to her as the savior who would put Pakistan back on the path it should follow. After all, it was the fifth-largest country in the world in population, with talented youth and great potential. Yet since the 1960s Pakistan had seen countries from Korea to China to even Bangladesh outstrip it in economic power. Wasn’t it time, after all, that this country take its place as a world leader?
A Reformer Threatening Deeply Rooted Traditions
And so, with the tacit support of the Americans and other western powers, she returned in 2007 to campaign for Pakistan’s leadership, received by adoring crowds – and posing a threat to those religious, economic, and social powers for whom reform was anathema. She was killed at a rally soon after her return. Her husband, recipient of sympathy votes, became the country’s president; but he was no replacement for Benezir, and the much-hoped-for reform movement died with her.
A Woman or Purpose Extraordinary
It’s difficult to draw a conclusion from her career about reform in general and women reformers in specific, especially when the backdrop of such an assessment is a complex and contradictory country like Pakistan.
One can argue that, on certain specific issues, she left a legacy: after all, honor-based attacks on wives that led to such horrors as acid disfiguration were legal in Pakistan until they were outlawed after her death. One can argue that the funds created in her memory to provide emergency support, especially to the poorest women of the country, are a fitting monument to someone who sought justice in a society rent by injustice.
But overall, the story of Benazir Bhutto is a sadder one, for most observers.
She was, in many ways, not her own woman, but the symbol of one, created not only by her family dynasty but by supporters, both domestic and foreign, who imbued in her the power to make right many things that simply were beyond her power, and indeed, beyond the power of anyone, at least in the short run.
Benazir may have been an extraordinary symbol of what a strong, intelligent woman could be. But the context of her task – reforming Pakistan – was itself so extraordinarily difficult that this woman, defined by her family, ethnicity, class, and gender, was bound to fail.