Benazir Bhutto’s final statement says Islam and democracy can coexist

Before Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October 2007, she seemed to predict her own death. In a letter to General Pervez Musharraf, she warned him that if she were killed, it would be with the help of his regime.

Indeed, there was an attempt to murder her hours after she arrived in Karachi on Oct. 18. A man in the crowd tried to thrust a baby, probably booby-trapped, into her arms just before the explosions. Her security team couldn’t see what was going on because the Pakistani military had extinguished the street lights to minimize TV coverage of her return, she claims. She survived the attack, but 179 people were killed.

Bhutto recounts these events in her new book, “Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West,” which she finished only hours before she was assassinated on Dec. 27.

Like everything in her life, it is an ambitious undertaking. As well as a campaign tract for the elections she had returned to her country to take part in, it is a global political manifesto asserting that Islam is compatible with democracy and urging reconciliation between the West and the Muslim world.

On Islam she treads a middle path, denouncing terrorism but also our Western tendency to lump moderates and extremists together. Less convincingly, she insists that the social and political inadequacies of many Muslim countries have nothing to do with religion.

Through selective quotation she would have us believe that the Quran is wide open to democracy, human rights and freedom for women. Tribal traditions, not Islam, she says, should be blamed for the restraints we see on Muslim women and personal freedoms today.

Be that as it may, the invocation of ancient texts as authorities on modern life, whether by Bhutto or anyone else, leaves this reader skeptical. Bible-literalism has the same effect on me.

Veering back to politics, she lambastes the Pakistani intelligence services for everything from collusion with the Taliban to political shenanigans against herself. The military fares no better. Both Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, who held power when the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan in 1979, and Musharraf are accused of “playing the West like a fiddle.” Western support for the generals, she claims, has caused democracy in her country to wither.

Her proposed remedies for Pakistan include a healthy emphasis on education and the creation of a larger middle class. Her talk of a Marshall Plan for her country is off-beam, however; the original plan only worked because postwar Europe was composed of civil, secular and democratic societies.

One hesitates to criticize a courageous woman so recently murdered. Yet her book fails to recognize that the quasi-feudal system she embodied is part of Pakistan’s problem. We are told much about her family and little about her political associates.

At times she writes in an eerily exalted, self-centered tone (“I would hear the injured say in a faint voice as life ebbed from them ... ‘Long live Bhutto’ ”). And accusations of corruption against her husband aren’t cleared up, though she claims Musharraf admitted to her they were rigged.

The struggle between the Bhutto dynasty and the generals continues, while Pakistan remains a failing state poisoned by poverty, corrupt social and military elites, and most pestilential of all, atavistic religion. Yet despite this book’s shortcomings, there are useful messages here both for the West and for a nation Bhutto rightly describes as “the most dangerous country in the world.”