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The story might have ended there, had Bhutto not penned this book before her death. It not only reveals who she believes was out to kill her, but also sets out how she would have led the country as prime minister, had she survived to take part in elections that she would certainly have won earlier this year.
On the first point, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West will make uncomfortable reading for anyone, like America and Britain, who has supported President Musharraf, in the belief that he may be a dictator but he is the West’s best ally in the struggle against militant Islam in Pakistan.
According to Bhutto, there were certainly plots by al-Qa’eda terrorists to kill her but also strong suspicions that the Pakistani authorities colluded with them. Her argument is based on the failed assassination attempt against her made on 18 October last year in Karachi, where 139 people were killed. Before the attack on her home- coming procession through the city, street lights were mysteriously switched off. Pakistani security forces prevented her from using sophisticated electronic defences against car bombs. The most damning evidence is that none of the investigators ever questioned her about the attack.
‘In Pakistan things are almost never as they seem. There are always circles within circles, rarely straight lines. This was meant to look like the work of al-Qa’eda and the Taleban, and I do not doubt that they were involved. But the sophistication of the plan . . . suggested a larger conspiracy,’ she wrote. ‘Elements from within the Pakisani intelligence services had actually created the Taleban in the 1980s and certain elements sympathised with al-Qa’eda ideologically and theologically. Some had recruited or worked with it. I had identified those I suspected in my letter to the general before my return.’
Bhutto uses the incident as part of the central argument of her book, that democracy and Islam are not incompatible, that it is in the West’s interests to promote a democratic Pakistan and that the contest between Islam and the West does not need to become a clash of civilisations.
Some of the argument, particularly when she strays into the Middle East, is a little thin on detail but her central thesis is made with passion and conviction. At times it reads like an open appeal to the White House and Downing Street not to ditch democracy in Pakistan in favour of more military rule.
We will never know what sort of leader Bhutto would have made had she lived to become Pakistan’s prime minister again. But it would be good to listen to her final appeal from beyond the grave.
Richard Beeston is Foreign Editor of The Times.
, £, pp. , ISBN
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