Deconstructing The Myth Of Benazir Bhutto

We noted yesterday that

It may be in our political interest to play along and support a mythology that elevates Benazir Bhutto, for the time being, in the same way we gave Arafat a certain status he did  not deserve. Certainly, political candidates on the stump are bestowing sainthood status on Benazir Bhutto faster than they did for Mother Teresa.

For an excellent take on events Pakistan, see Unqualified Reservation (h/t Fausta)

Political power in Pakistan is shared among a huge variety of parties, gangs, cliques, alliances, mafias, liberation fronts, Islamic sects, human-rights groups, military units, and the like. All of them have one goal: to maximize their capture of the economic production of the Indus River basin…

…the Pakistani movements are presently aligned in three major factions. None of these factions has yet been able to defeat either of the others. However, each has its own vision of a Pakistan in which it prevails totally, and any of them could win..

…it is not a secret that Bhutto herself was a mob queen, at least that many of her associates were gangsters, but the Westernists had an easy solution for this. If they needed to come across as especially clean and sweet and true, they could just condemn Bhutto as a mob queen. She was not offended, at least not unusually offended. You think she didn’t know she was a gangster? So, for example, this article…

Read the entire piece. It’s a keeper.

Hitchens on Bhutto:

Her tenure ended—as did her subsequent “comeback” tenure—in a sorry welter of corruption charges and political intrigue, and in a gilded exile in Dubai.

…when she was prime minister, she pursued a very active pro-Taliban policy, designed to extend and entrench Pakistani control over Afghanistan…The fact of the matter is that Benazir’s undoubted courage had a certain fanaticism to it.

…Zulfikar Bhutto was an autocratic opportunist, and this family tradition was carried on by the PPP, a supposedly populist party that never had a genuine internal election and was in fact—like quite a lot else in Pakistan—Bhutto family property.

No wonder she and Hillary Clinton were so close.

Via Ace, comes this dose of reality from Mark Steyn:

She was beautiful and charming and sophisticated and smart and modern, and everything we in the west would like a Muslim leader to be – though in practice, as Pakistan’s Prime Minister, she was just another grubby wardheeler from one of the world’s most corrupt political classes.

Since her last spell in power, Pakistan has changed, profoundly. Its sovereignty is meaningless in increasingly significant chunks of its territory, and, within the portions Musharraf is just about holding together, to an ever more radicalized generation of young Muslim men Miss Bhutto was entirely unacceptable as the leader of their nation. “Everyone’s an expert on Pakistan, a faraway country of which we know everything,” I wrote last month. “It seems to me a certain humility is appropriate.” The State Department geniuses thought they had it all figured out. They’d arranged a shotgun marriage between the Bhutto and Sharif factions as a “united” “democratic” “movement” and were pushing Musharraf to reach a deal with them. That’s what diplomats do: They find guys in suits and get ‘em round a table. But none of those representatives represents the rapidly evolving reality of Pakistan. Miss Bhutto could never have been a viable leader of a post-Musharraf settlement, and the delusion that she could have been sent her to her death. Earlier this year, I had an argument with an old (infidel) boyfriend of Benazir’s, who swatted my concerns aside with the sweeping claim that “the whole of the western world” was behind her. On the streets of Islamabad, that and a dime’ll get you a cup of coffee.

As I said, she was everything we in the west would like a Muslim leader to be. We should be modest enough to acknowledge when reality conflicts with our illusions.

However one might feel about Pervez Musharraf, he in no way damaged Pakistan to the extent that the few families that have had a stranglehold on that nation for decades.  The nation of Pakistan has been plundered and the Pakistani people have been no more than serfs to oligarchies of that nation.

To understand just how deep the Pakistani void is, consider the following: Pakistan and Israel came into existence at about the same time.

Pakistan is still a third world nation and descending even further into more political and religious chaos and dysfunction. Israel, despite the very real threats and violence she has known since her inception, has a first world economy, society and culture.

By almost every measuring stick, Pakistan is a failed state. Her people were led down the garden path by leaders who cared for little more than their own enrichment and aggrandizement.

We noted yesterday in Pakistan’s Arafat

Benazir Bhutto was Pakistan’s Arafat. She stole billions of dollars from her nation and was forced to leave office twice because of corruption charges and allegations she had her own brother assassinated…

When in it is all said and done, Benazir Bhutto was Arafat in a hijab. Like Arafat, she will be remembered for who she really was- corrupt and oppressive and someone who cared little for her people.

See the NYT’s Bhutto Clan Leaves A Trail Of Corruption In Pakistan.

Pakistanis deserve better than Benazor Bhutto or anything else they have known.