There's a Shakespearean quality to the late Benazir Bhutto's life, but if you scour the Bard's tragedies for an appropriate epitaph, the mind tends to settle on "Nothing is, but what is not."
It's no accident that the most ambivalent -- indeed, sinister -- line from "Macbeth" commends itself. The play is, after all, one of the canon's greatest tales of impacted ambition, betrayal and convoluted deceit. It is, in other words, rather like the political history of wretched Pakistan, which, according to Bhutto, "today is the most dangerous place in the world," not least because it is both unstable and nuclear-armed.
Bhutto was twice her country's prime minister (1988-1990 and 1993-1996) and had returned from involuntary exile to campaign for a third term when she was assassinated in December. Her killers were Islamic extremists, though many believe they were abetted by the country's notorious security forces. Political killings are woven through Pakistani history like a bright red thread, though the weaver's hand usually is obscure. Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto -- also a "populist" prime minister -- was executed by the general who overthrew him. One of her brothers was poisoned; another was shot dead by persons unknown in 1996. She blamed the security forces; others believed her own husband, the notoriously corrupt Asif Ali Zardari, was involved.
"Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West" was finished just two days before the Harvard- and Oxford-educated Bhutto, 55, was killed. Her name is alone on the title page, though a "reader's note" by her longtime friend and advisor, Washington political consultant and lobbyist Mark A. Siegel, indicates that he collaborated on the manuscript. In any case, the book is -- like the woman -- alternately fascinating, frustrating and opaque in a dodgy sort of way.
Tumult in Pakistan
In part, it's a story of Bhutto's return and the campaign that followed. In part, it's a fragmentary account of her years preparing for and exercising power in a tumultuous Muslim state. Bhutto's account of these events is, at best, fragmentary and selective. She campaigned -- and presents herself in "Reconciliation" -- as a modernizing, reasonably secular democrat, and so she was.
