Meanwhile in the same capital, ostensibly the very stronghold of government
power, we witness the strange spectacle of stick-waving, burkha-clad
schoolgirls – like a fundamentalist version of St Trinian’s – kidnapping
suspected brothel-keeping madames (an elderly woman, her daughter,
daughter-in-law and six-month-old granddaughter), and then the police
officers themselves who came to release the captives. But the more one reads
about this incident, the more alarming it becomes. In Feburary, 3,000 of
these female students from the hardline Jamia Hafsa madrassa connected to
the Lal Masjid mosque, occupied the only children’s library in Islamabad,
where they remain, saying that any action to remove them will be met with
violence. The black-shrouded girls have also been seen in the company of
male students carrying Kalashnikov rifles. During their protests, the
students chant the names of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taleban
leader.
The headquarters of Pakistan’s intelligence security agency – the ISI – are
close to the mosque and it has been reported that several of its members are
regulars there. Some believe that there are rogue elements within the agency
who have strong ties with al-Qaeda and the Taleban. Ever since Musharraf
chose to back America’s War on Terror, there have been calls in the mosque
for his death.
Even to those of us in the West who are not nuanced in the labyrinthine
historical intricacies of the politics of Pakistan, there is a growing
concern that what happens so many miles away has the potential to make a
devastating impact on our own lives. Dutiful English-born boys, often from
blameless Muslim families, continue to travel to Pakistan – some already
radicalised but not all – to one or other madrassas, emerging from those
religious schools with a hatred of their parents’ adopted country, and we
are all too aware of where that can lead.
It was my understanding that Musharraf’s inability to control the
Taleban-controlled Waziristan – on the Pakistan border of Afghanistan – was
an inevitable source of disquiet for his American backers and likely to make
them at the very least question his leadership qualities. Benazir Bhutto’s
response to a recent treaty which had been negotiated was: “My party would
not have allowed the Taleban to become such a huge force that they would
need to sign a peace treaty.” What the West wants to avoid at all costs is
the possibility of the fundamentalists seizing power. And according to
Bhutto, who is, of course, hardly an impartial observer, Musharraf, far from
being weak, is strategically catering to the extremists in order to convince
the US that unless they continue to back him their worst fears will be
realised. Does Bhutto know whether Musharraf is anxious about losing US
backing? “The indications are that he is confident that he has the support
of the White House and that because of the situation arising with Iran’s
stand-off with the West he feels that he will continue to be a key ally,”
she says. “In fact, as far as General Musharraf is concerned, I think he
feels that he’s got the West in his hands.” A provocative remark fully
intended, one feels, to pack a well-aimed punch.
Bhutto believes that the PPP is feared by the current powers that be because
“my party has a modern agenda, speaks for the ordinary Pakistanis and has
grass-roots support,” she says. “And they dislike me because I’m a woman and
because my father was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. And they have a hatred for the
Bhutto family, stemming from the fact that my father was able to defeat them
in the elections – and the only political party that has defeated this army
slate or generals’ slate in my father’s time and my time has been the PPP.”
When she was first elected in 1988, there wasn’t an awareness of what was
really happening in the madrassas – “But by the time I became prime minister
for the second time in 1993, Pakistan was on the brink of being declared a
terrorist state and my government worked very closely with the international
community to reform the madrassas and restore law and order.” None of this
was painless, she says, “there was bloodshed in the streets of Karachi
[which was flooded with Afghan refugees in the Eighties and Nineties, and
there were terrible scenes of political and sectarian violence] and I can’t
tell you how awful it was getting daily reports of 30 people killed and 20
people killed, but I ended the army operation there after one year, and in
the second year the raids went down and I remember how happy I was when I
got my first report of ‘zero deaths’. These militant terrorists hold whole
cities and towns and villages hostage, and it’s not easy confronting them.”
Bhutto represents everything the fundamentalists hate – a powerful,
highly-educated woman operating in a man’s world, seemingly unafraid to
voice her independent views and, indeed, seemingly unafraid of anything,
including the very real possibility that one day someone might succeed in
killing her because of who she is. Her father brought her up to believe in
their Islamic faith’s certainty that life and death are in God’s hands.
Perhaps it is also her sense of destiny – the daughter, rather than her
brothers, groomed from such an early age to be the political heir to her
father, despite her initial reluctance – which explains her equanimity in
the face of death. “My father always would say, ‘My daughter will go into
politics… My daughter will become prime minister’, but it’s not what I
wanted to do. I would say, ‘No, Papa, I will never go into politics.’ As
I’ve said before, this is not the life I chose; it chose me,” she says. “But
I accepted the responsibility and I’ve never wavered in my commitment.” Does
this unshakable certainty make it easier for her to accept whatever happens
to her? “Yes, in a way, because I don’t fear death. I remember my last
meeting with my father when he told me, ‘You know, tonight when I will be
killed, my mother and my father will be waiting for me.’ It makes me weepy,”
she says, as her eyes fill up, “but I don’t think it can happen unless God
wants it to happen because so many people have tried to kill me.
“Let me tell you, the World Trade Center was attacked twice, although most
people only remember the second one. But the first time, in 1993, it was
Ramzi Yousef and the second attack was by [his uncle] Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, who has confessed and is in American custody, and both these men
tried to kill me and failed. So they succeeded with the World Trade towers
but they didn’t succeed with me.” This is quite a bravura statement, despite
its matter-of-fact delivery. But then she does have an occasional tendency
to express herself in hyperbolic terms, which makes her sound rather
grandiose. In the new preface of her autobiography, she compares herself –
in the context of her drawn-out reluctance to get married – to Elizabeth I,
“who had also endured imprisonment and remained single”.
When we discuss her initiative to privatise the public sector in Pakistan,
inspired by Margaret Thatcher’s policies (an unusual role model for a
socialist, particularly one whose father introduced nationalisation to his
country), she makes a point of saying: “Very few people realise that it was
my government [in 1988-90] that was the catalyst for the privatisation of
South Asia… And now when you look at socialism, it is redefined even in the
Scandinavian countries and in England. But I redefined socialism. I was
simply doing what other socialists were going to do – and ten years before
Tony Blair.”
At one point, I try unsuccessfully to draw Bhutto out on her social life at
Harvard and Oxford, where she cut such a glamorous figure in her racy yellow
sports car, and she explains why this whole area is so difficult for her to
discuss: “When I returned to Pakistan, I was held on a pedestal. I was
neither man nor woman. I was regarded as a saint.”
Bhutto may be to some a somewhat tarnished saint by now, her reputation
sullied by the corruption charges, of which the most damaging is the ongoing
court case in Switzerland, (“Oh, they’ve gone on endlessly,” she sighs),
regardless of the eventual outcome. But she is still a force to be reckoned
with, as witnessed by the febrile speculation over her comeback. She
maintains that had her government remained in power, most of the world’s
terrorist tragedies would not have occurred – since the trail so often leads
back to Pakistan.
“I really do think that there is at least some degree of causality that most
major terrorist attacks took place when the extremists did not have to deal
with a democratic Pakistani government, when they operated without check and
oversight,” she writes in the new conclusion to her book. “I believe that if
my government had not been destabilised in Pakistan in 1996, the Taleban
could not have allowed Osama bin Laden to set up base in Afghanistan, openly
recruit and train young men from all over the Muslim world and declare war
on America in 1998.”
