BHUTTO'S VANITY, AMERICA'S HYPOCRISY & PAKISTAN'S FUTURE

A New Year’s Eve Fable

by Maliha Masood, Matrix Correspondent
















Once upon a time, there lived a woman named Benazir. She was born in 1953 in a village in rural Pakistan, when the country was only six years old. Hers was a country brought into existence due to a bloody geographical operation known as the Partition. It was mostly a botched up political arrangement, engineered by three civil servants with very different agendas and three very different personalities. One was a dashing British viceroy, the last official ruler of the jewel in the crown before it rusted into oblivion at the stroke of the midnight hour in the year 1947. The other was a power hungry idealist who would be known in human resource departments as a bad team player. And the third was a terribly misunderstood Muslim lawyer who spoke in the clipped tones of the Queen’s English and dressed in the best of Saville Row suits that could have well been stitched by Noel Coward’s tailors. Unable to see eye to eye, the hapless threesome decided to draw a line in the sand somewhere in the northwest region of the ancient Thar Desert. That line would consequently split India into two hefty chunks. Pakistan was a result of this split (which of course means that at one point all of Pakistan used to be India and Pakistanis are intimate cousins to the Indians, however much everyone wants to pretend they don’t know the Other, so they behave like aliens from different planets living next door.) But let us leave that aside for another fable. For now we have something else to reckon with, a most wicked tale, full of woes, an eternal tale of ego and greed, nothing really that we humans don’t already know. So let us for old time’s sake gather around the holiday fire, eggnog in hand and lend our ears to what follows next.

From the very beginning, the Benazir girl was surrounded by riches and the usual smug attitudes of the privileged elite. An ethnic Sindhi in a land of refugees, she traced her belongings on tribal lines and on the legacy of a political dynasty. Her father Zufikhar, was a charismatic man with tons of promise. He was famous in diplomatic circles for his fiery and articulate speeches in the UN assembly that often concluded with a dramatic toss of his papers and a stormy exit befitting a Roman emperor. And just like Mark Anthony, Zulfikhar Ali Bhutto had his penchant for fine wine and Cleopatras. Upon becoming President in the early 1970’s, he turned into a socialist and began promising every Pakistani citizen the uncontested rights to roti, kapra aur makan. Food, Clothes and Housing. If only he could have delivered on such lauded hopes. There was a moment, however brief, in 1972 when Zulfi did pull a nice one, loading on the Pakistani charm on a peace treaty visit to Simla, just next door in India, which was saying quite a lot as the old enemies had just fought a bloody war a year ago that ended in more hatred and vexations for some time to come. There was much oohing and ahhing when father and daughter traveled up together to say Namaste to Indira Gandhi. Benazir was just 19 years old and freshly returned from a stint at Harvard where the gossip mills say she spent more time partying than she did studying in the stacks of Widener. But then again, Pinky (as was her nickname) couldn’t really help herself for being a bit of a party animal, not with those gaunt cheekbones, aquiline Bhutto nose and bold black eyes that practically screamed hot foxy babe who would be invited to the best bashes in Cambridge not just because of her name, but also because of her luminous model worthy face that oddly enough happened to be the face of a Muslim woman, make that a very stylish Muslim woman with the haughty features of European aristocrats. Cutting such an attractive figure as she did, it was no wonder that Benazir became a media darling as soon as the TV cameras spun in her direction. She lost no time in learning to wield the attention like a seasoned Hollywood pro and lapped up every glorious satellite beam coming her way. Indeed it was special the way it cast a flattering glow on her ebony tresses covered with the flimsiest of snow white veils for modesty’s decorum.

Now to make a long story short, Benazir’s father did not last long in public office. He soon shed his robes of being one with the masses for being one without opponents. Zulfi Bhutto got caught up in a ruthless game of power politics determined to root out anyone standing in his way, which eventually led to his own shortcoming. He was hanged in a Rawalpindi jail on charges of a murder conspiracy. Poor Benazir who was every inch her father’s daughter suffered a major loss. She had no idea at the time that a decade later, she would be sworn in as Pakistan’s first female Prime Minister, but this is precisely what happened in 1988 when the man who put her father to his death, was sent to his own funeral in a plane crash and so ended the rule of Zia ul Haq who had played an instrumental role in helping to root out the Russians from Afghanistan when the Americans came begging and pleading at his feet. Indeed, so desperate were the Americans that they along with their rich friends in Saudi Arabia, pledged guns and drugs and cash to outfit the soldiers of resistance who would later be called terrorists and fanatics by other names, such as Osama, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. After victory was declared and the Commies marched back to Siberia in shame, the Americans ditched their noble efforts and fled home, leaving behind a power vacuum mess that would end up hatching the roosters haunting today’s skyscrapers, subways and airports. This of course paved a clear path for the folks in Washington to wag their righteous fingers and scold their ugly monsters which they do in typical American fashion as done before in Vietnam, Latin America, and more recently in Iraq. The motto is simple. Just say the opposite of what you really want to achieve. It’s an old trick and it still works.

Now the lady in our fable was no doubt a lousy leader. She had her chances, not just once, but twice to be head of state and steer a sensible course of action. It was horribly neglected, busy as she was piling on the family wealth by dubious means, pinching a little here and there from the government coffers, eliminating opposition, (which seems to be an unfortunate family trait), and basically not making the most of the golden opportunity to do something decent and good for the people of Pakistan. For all her accolades of courage, let us remember her less than stellar track record as a two time PM, and let us not go around calling apples oranges. You can try all you want to call apples oranges or vice versa but what you get in the end is a big fat lie. And let us also not forget that the line between courage and stupidity is sometimes very thin and Benazir knew this as intimately as any mountain climber or thrill seeker. One fine day, when enough was enough, she was booted out of office and sent packing to London and Dubai where she lived a very comfortable life of bonbons and rococo furniture that could hardly be called exile. She tolerated it for eight long years, smarting all the time for being a relative Nobody overseas when she could be a Major Somebody back on her own turf.

Bhutto’s motive to make a spectacular comeback suited the Americans just fine. In fact, they made all the arrangements and extended all kinds of conveniences to make the deal cinch. Remember their old motto to speak in reverse code. So when you really want to create massive mayhem and spawn a breeding ground for terrorism, what do you do? You say you want democracy, knowing that is an impossible dream in a land teaming with fanatics and lo and behold, surprise, surprise, what you’ll end up getting in the end is precisely the antithesis of democratic rule and order. Of course, you make a big fuss in public, faking stoic sadness when your aims for democracy get literally shot down and this is the part when our fable takes a nastier twist and it’s up to you to call it tragedy or farce. Our brave but foolish leading lady dodges a sniper’s bullet and hits her head on the sunroof, fracturing her skull and bleeding toward death. You would think she would have known better after all the warnings she was given, yet just like her old Pinky self, the party co-ed who couldn’t resist a fun bash, our lady was a victim of her own vanity and incapable of resisting one last wave to her adoring fans. If she had really cared about the fate of those fans and the future of her country and of protecting her own pretty hide, she could have kept herself in check and remained underexposed. This of course was a tough act for a woman who loved a good limelight. And it is arguable that Benazir would have gone sooner or later, so long as she was a public figure and a woman in today’s Pakistan where her photogenic face, hip swaddling, head turning, pro Western presence couldn’t have been tolerated for long. Not by all those repressed mullahs and fundos, a sicko breed, very much in the minority of the country’s population, but being the most vocal breed, coming across as the majority. And so it was that Benazir Bhutto was called to rest alongside her beloved father’s grave in the village of her birth. As for whether she rests in peace or not, only the angels can know. What we do know for sure in our little fable is that the lamb was indeed devoured by the lions--just as predicted--and that the people who opened the cage are the ones wearing crocodile tears. Democracy? Yeah right! They wanted no such thing and now they’re having a field day in private chambers patting each other’s back for a lucky strike, a total freebie that came just in time to ring in the New Year with bells and whistles. Can’t you just hear the whoops of laughter….listen closely and maybe you will.

Hooray for the war on terror! Three cheers for Al-Qaeda!! Let’s hear it for those Jihadis!!! Go Islamic Militants!!! And may you, Pakistan, our most dangerous and most indispensable ally and public nemesis have yourself a long and uncertain future that will bring you more chaos, many more heartaches and give us more cause for celebrations. And so we must bid farewell to our fair maiden Benazir. Make no mistake. The Americans will have their moments of glory, however unjust they seem, but also remember this. Every civilization has a beginning and an end. And the day will come when America will indeed fall from its high and mighty hypocritical perch. As for this tattered rubbish heap of a nation the world knows as Pakistan, what can one say, except Allah knows best.

The End.

Maliha Masood is an award-winning writer and the author of Zaatar Days, Henna Nights. A former policy analyst at the International Crisis Group in Islamabad, she is the founder and president of The Diwaan Project, a Seattle-based cultural institute geared toward public education on global affairs. Maliha teaches a course on women and Islam at the University of Washington and is currently at work on her first novel set in contemporary Pakistan.

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