Reconciliation by Benazir Bhutto

From The Week of September 27, 2009

Though
Benazir Bhutto goes to some length to reveal herself to us in Reconciliation, which is part memoir and part argument for the coming together of democratic west with Islamic east, we are always left wondering what Ms. Bhutto didn't say, what she didn't expose. Which of the many truths about her troubled home of Pakistan were left to be gleaned from between the lines of her elegant but overly optimistic treatise. And now we will never know.

Given that Benazir Bhutto was born into what is, in a political sense, the
royal family of Pakistan, it was inevitable that her life would be consumed by Pakistan. She was prime minister of that tortured nation twice and on neither occasion did she seem in command of her country. Though Ms. Bhutto claims to have had her administrations sabotaged by the militaristic opposition in Pakistani politics, I found myself wondering about her own failures of leadership. Nations struggling towards democracy must be built slowly, through compromise, through at least the veneer of political consensus. They cannot be delivered through passion alone. Passion is, after all, what radical oppositions have in spades. Ms. Bhutto seems to have felt that radicals in the military, religious, and intelligence hierarchies of her country would not dare to murder her supporters in broad daylight, would not dare to anger the West by obstructing and then overturning a democratically elected government of Pakistan. And yet that is exactly what they did.

Though it's clear that Ms. Bhutto faced significant challenges in her time in power, she failed to check the growth of her country's radical forces. She failed to even know about the secret nuclear program being conducted right under her nose by
A. Q. Khan. And ultimately, she failed to buttress critical institutions like the judiciary which might have prevented the usurpation of power in her country. All this gives Reconciliation the air of a last-gasp appeal to her people, to the West, and to the moderate Muslims the world over, to come together and to meet on common ground. And yet, without acknowledging her own failings, Ms. Bhutto falls back on tired scripture to argue that the destabilizing crimes religious radicals are committing in the name of Islam are un-Islamic. But that we already knew.

Sadly, Ms. Bhutto was assassinated in 2007, in a highly publicized return to Pakistan. And while I can criticize her book and her flaws as a leader of a nation, I will not question her bravery and her love of country which both, by all appearances, were absolute. It is a shame that she did not govern Pakistan during a safer, more democratic time. She might have been great. (3/5 Stars)