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foreigners: Opinions about events beyond our borders.

The Lessons of Benazir BhuttoCrafting a better Pakistan policy by studying her achievements.

By Mahnaz Ispahani
Posted Monday, Jan. 7, 2008, at 12:09 PM ET

Benazir Bhutto

Delayed elections are the latest effort by the Musharraf government to limit the power of civilian political parties in Pakistan. In this context, the lessons of Benazir Bhutto's life and her ghastly death must be a wake-up call to the Bush administration and certainly to its successor: Accepting a garrison state, however disguised, over a legitimately elected civilian government, is an acknowledgment of terror's emerging triumph in Pakistan. It has always been a short-term, tactical, and doomed solution to the long-term, incendiary problem of security of governance in a nuclear-armed state. The lesson of Benazir Bhutto is that without a long-term and significant investment in civilian political institutions, especially political parties, Pakistan, and with it the "global war on terror," will be lost. The task is frustrating, requires a significant financial commitment, and is not without risks, but the potential rewards are far greater than a continuing alliance with President Pervez Musharraf.

The killing of Benazir Bhutto crystallized the hopelessness felt by many Pakistanis, trapped between soldiers and suicide bombers. There is no need to romanticize the former prime minister. She was an imperfect leader in a vastly imperfect country where democrats are not made to order. Great expectations were always attached to her, and she could not live up to them all. Still, the immediate verdict has been too harsh (puppet-master of the Taliban and Kashmir insurgencies—a few generals and the ubiquitous intelligence mafia were at that table), and at times almost cartoonish: Pinky Bhutto of Harvard College, master social-political networker.

If that is all we focus on, we will miss much. From her early 20s, Benazir Bhutto was a true civilian politician. That is to say, she was not a creature of the military, as are most prominent Pakistani politicians and bureaucrats and even some journalists. For that personal autonomy, the soldiers hated her. Bhutto lived her life utterly independently, mysteriously fearless and persistent in the face of frightening odds. She was a secular woman leader with a powerful political constituency that she sought to mobilize, first against dictators and then against Islamists. This political constituency must survive and be nurtured in Pakistan if the extremists are to be faced down. Stronger civil society groups and a revived, honorable judiciary are important to Pakistan's future, but they cannot defeat the extremists without civilian political parties and civilian leaders. Bhutto's constituency could provide the bulk of the buffer against radical extremists. Certainly, we have seen that the Pakistani army cannot do the job while it also governs Pakistan.

Bhutto was an unflinching woman leader for more than 25 years—in a tribal, feudal, and religious environment that makes Pakistan a cruel and constraining place for women. For all Islamists, rule by a woman is untenable. Where women are to be entirely private, Bhutto was insistently public. Where women must choose between family (good) and public life (bad), she managed both. I will not forget the powerful image of a pregnant Bhutto standing on a tank, taking a salute.

Changing the lives of Pakistani women requires not only international support for education and NGOs. It also required working with a Muslim woman leader—Bhutto—while she lived, to build on her strengths and to help her temper her flaws and learn from her mistakes. For all the talk of Muslim women's rights, in the end, U.S. policy has patronizingly preferred that the generals take care of them. Although Bhutto could have done more to transform the situation of poor women in Pakistan when she was prime minister, the visible force of her public personality presented possibilities for women that feel irretrievably lost to me today.

In the 1990s, immature civilian experiments in democracy were virtually ignored by the United States, and Bhutto was tripped up by her inexperience, the winner-take-all political culture—and the ever-present gaze of the soldier. Since Sept. 11, the dominant policy argument has been that in order to protect U.S. interests, we must give short shrift to the political aspirations of 160 million Pakistanis—after all, their leaders are corrupt failures, unworthy of investment. And while Bhutto's return to Pakistan in 2007 showed that an aspirational electoral political culture is very much alive in Pakistan (and she said she had learned lessons from past policy errors), immediately after her death, after all that has happened, we are told that there is still no alternative to Musharraf.

This long-standing, mistaken "no-alternative to Musharraf" policy was dominant in 2007, when it was clear that Musharraf's men (apparently incorruptible soldiers who have somehow swallowed up large chunks of Pakistan's economy) had failed to secure the nation. The militants have encroached from the borderlands well into tourist resorts and the nation's cities.