Pakistan's Playboy and the Oil King
Who Will Succeed Bhutto? The clearest thing amid all the chaos in Pakistan is that the country's most likely kingmaker won't be Pervez Musharraf, and it certainly won't be the United States. It will be Benazir Bhutto's 51-year-old husband, Asif Zardari. The roguish Zardari isn't very well known in the West, but in South Asia he's a celebrity, a charming former playboy who was imprisoned by Musharraf for corruption during Bhutto's terms as prime minister. I've interviewed Zardari, and he's got a natural feel for politics, and has his own magnetism, something lacking in most of the other people Bhutto surrounded herself with. I strongly doubt that he himself could lead the party because of his tainted past. But, given the sympathy factor, and the disarray engulfing Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party, he is likely to choose who does. Dark horse: remember the name Aitzaz Ahsan, who led the lawyer's uprising against Musharraf. He broke with Bhutto but could emerge from the pack, that is should Musharraf ever release him from prison.Exxon in Russia: The American company may be undergoing the Shell treatment. Last year, Shell was forced by Gazprom to hand over control of the giant Sakhalin-II natural gas field – that is if it wanted to keep doing business in
Labels: ahsan, bhutto, Exxon, Gazprom, musharraf, oil, pakistan, sakhalin, zardari
6 Comments:
Jemima Khan, best-known as the ex-wife of Pakistani cricket star turned politician Imran, has some surprisingly useful contributions:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=KWA5XAFDAJIH1QFIQMGCFGGAVCBQUIV0?xml=/opinion/2007/12/30/do3003.xml
In particular:
...[S]he depicted herself in the West as the answer to religious extremism and the last hope for democracy. A beautiful, Harvard- and Oxford-educated, Shakespeare-quoting, Queen's English-speaking Muslim woman - she was always "one of us" and easily forgiven.
The West lapped up the facile soundbites and overlooked the deeply flawed political record. Just as most Western commentators have done after her death.
That is probably right, isn't it? (And no doubt true also of her ex-husband.) We westerners do tend to invest too much, politically, in leaders abroad who seem "like us."
FH: what surprises me is the tone of such remembrances and articles. I think that by and large the reporting on Bhutto has been balanced. There have been hagiographies to be sure. But there also have been plenty of people who have noted the flaws. Thanks for the remark and best, Steve
Anne Applebaum addresses the same issue (http://www.slate.com/id/2181079/fr/rss/), comparing western affections for Bhutto with our admiration for Gorbachev, Sadat, the shah of Iran, and "moderates" in the Saudi royal family.
I think it's a disturbing point: We vest people such as these with what we choose to view as "westernizing" instincts, like ours, only to discover that this disqualifies them from leadership among their compatriots.
Hi FH: thanks for the link to the Anne Applebaum piece, which I find fairly well flawed. For convenience, here is a comment I posted to her Slate article:
Anne, it seems to me that you have taken a solid observation appropriate to a couple of countries -- that one-size-fits-all pro-western politicians aren't necessarily welcomed at home -- and invalidly applied it elsewhere.
Anwar Sadat and Hamid Karzai are two points you get right.
But Gorbachev is unpopular at home because it's thought that he embarked on his perestroika without anticipating the impact on the country -- without planning for the after-war, if you will.
Some or all of the Saudis are unpopular in some circles for a variety of reasons, but mainly because they insist on keeping power in the family to the exclusion of anyone else.
And, while Bhutto was bitterly opposed by some elements in her country, that's something one could say about any given politician in any country, including our own. It had little or nothing to do with her activities in the west. Her PPP is popular in her traditional constituency, the one cultivated by her father, while Nawaz Sharif is supported by his constituency, the IJI, the military, the clerics and so forth. Both of them were/are despised by their opponents, and both were monumentally corrupt in office. We don't know precisely why she was killed, but it probably was the Islamic militants who have their own ideas of what a Pakistani government should look like; they also have tried to kill Musharraf, and it appears are targeting Sharif as well. In other words, your thesis doesn't work as regards Bhutto either.
Steve -- I may have misled us both by misinterpreting Applebaum's take a bit, by suggesting that western support itself may disqualify these leaders from support at home. I shouldn't have taken it that far.
My point -- and I think her point -- is simply that we tend to see domestic political conflicts abroad through our own cultural prism, choosing our heroes and champions based on litmus tests which often have no political value in the home country, and sometimes a negative value.
In that respect, Gorbachev is a very good example. Ordinary Soviets rarely shared the west's admiration for him, even before the collapse.
FH: yes if Anne had left it at that, which is entirely reasonable, she would have been on solid ground. On the other hand, do you find it a very trenchant observation? I was struck for instance by Roger Cohen's column the other day comparing the Bhutto assassination to that of Yitzhak Rabin, which is absolutely ludicrous. Bhutto was a big talker. Rabin was a huge doer. Thanks FH, Steve
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