U.S. News & World Report

Islamabad

How Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto dazzled the world but self-destructed at home

She may be a world-class crowd pleaser but Benazir Bhutto is no politician. She spent 20 months in power making enemies while her rivals were busy making political pacts. This is why, although she roused the biggest and most fervent rallies in a lackluster campaign, she was not just defeated but demolished at the polls last week.

Stunned by the loss of half her parliamentary seats, Pakistan's ex-Prime Minister cried foul. In some precincts, 35 percent more votes were cast last week than in the last election two years ago, but a team of international observers said it had found no evidence of widespread electoral fraud.

In any event, what brought Bhutto crashing down was not ballot rigging. She lost because her opponents were cleverer at exploiting the flukes in the British-style electoral system and because even illiterate voters turned out to be savvy enough to switch their votes to the party with the best chance of beating Bhutto. When the National Assembly meets to choose a Prime Minister next month, Bhutto's 45 People's Party members will be overwhelmed by an Islamic Democratic Alliance that controls two thirds of the 217-seat house.

Many Pakistanis were put off by a one-sided drive to discredit Bhutto after she was dismissed by presidential order last August. The same "neutral" President Ghulam Ishaq Khan gave an election-eve speech that sounded like an anti-Bhutto commercial. But voters were even more outraged by the blundering and plundering of Bhutto's rule. Her party's 36 percent of the popular vote was its lowest share in the four elections since it was founded more than 20 years ago.

Pakistanis voted to throw the rascals out. But they may have succeeded only in bringing another lot of rascals in. Many of the rich businessmen and landlords who will replace the Bhutto team have less than spotless reputations. One of them piled up an implausibly high margin in last week's vote. But because the new government will have such a big majority, party leaders will have less incentive than they did under Bhutto's shaky regime to rely on big-time bribery to keep members in line.

Household names. In an issueless election, anti-American, anti-Indian and pro-nuclear rhetoric filled the vacuum. Pakistan may be the only country in the world where a populist like Bhutto can harangue 100,000 people for nearly an hour on the subject of nuclear power plants (good) and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (bad). Two days later on the same parade ground in Rawalpindi, a leading mullah invoked such household names as Representative Stephen Solarz (D-N.Y.), Senate aide Peter Galbraith and lobbyist Mark Siegel as evidence that Bhutto was dealing with the devil and marshaling a Zionist conspiracy against Pakistan.

The mood of fierce patriotism whipped up by irresponsible politicians on both sides augurs hard bargaining ahead over terms for freeing up U.S. aid, now barred because of advances this year in Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program. Pakistan is ill-placed to make good on its threats to go it alone because its foreign-exchange reserves are down to a few weeks' worth of imports, military spare parts are running short and the Gulf crisis is costing the country some $ 1 billion to $ 1.6 billion a year. Prices of key commodities will have to rise, perhaps by 40 percent.

But Pakistan has weathered worse crises. And Bhutto's successors start with one enormous asset she never had: The blessing of the generals, who proved they are still the ultimate arbiters of power by dumping Benazir Bhutto last summer, just as they had ousted her father from the same office 13 years ago. Even under Bhutto, the generals were left to run Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program and the guerrilla wars in Afghanistan and Kashmir. So the change in government is unlikely to have much effect on Pakistani policy in any of the three areas most important to America.

Nor is Bhutto herself likely to change. A never-say-die fighter, she is sure to carry on fighting now -- to vindicate herself and her family on the opposition benches, in the courts and in the international media. The dogged pugnaciousness that sustained her during years of imprisonment and exile may do so again. The irony is that it was this same uncompromising quality that precipitated her downfall by alienating Pakistan's power brokers and polarizing its voters.

"Benazir was loved by some and hated by more when she came to power two years ago," says pollster Ijaz Gilani, the head of Gallup Pakistan. "Since then, she has deepened the lines of hatred even further." It was the consolidating of this anti-Bhutto feeling in politically pivotal Punjab that cost her the election.

"She never made the transition from being leader of a crusade to being a governing Prime Minister," a close friend explains. Her long crusade to defend and then avenge her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was executed by Mohammed Zia ul-Haq's military regime in 1979, became a one-woman show as his old comrades progressively peeled off in anger. It imprinted a siege mentality, put a premium on loyalty and reinforced a belief that democracy in Pakistan is synonymous with Bhutto-family rule.

A family fief. This sense of entitlement also derived from the Bhuttos' position as large landowners in rural Sind Province, where feudal lords still command the kind of fealty that went out of fashion in Europe centuries ago. Bhutto's mother, Nusrat, for example, was re-elected from the family fief last week without even setting foot in the country, much less her constituency, during the campaign. She and her daughter will be the only two women in the newly elected assembly.

Being a Bhutto, which is Pakistan's equivalent of being a Kennedy, is clearly central to Benazir's identity. It weighs far more heavily than the seven years she spent getting educated and acclimatized in Western ways at Harvard and Oxford. It explains why she surrounded herself with courtiers rather than counselors. Along with a total lack of experience -- her Prime Ministership was her first salaried job -- it accounts for some of the staggering misjudgments that brought her down.

"She approached everything from a partisan view of the world," notes a diplomatic Bhutto-watcher. "She became Prime Minister of the People's Party, not of Pakistan." This meant filling thousands of jobs with people whose only qualification was their "suffering" during the Zia years. The latest charges against her in the special courts set up after her dismissal are that she put 10,387 people into government jobs without going through the proper procedures. She also took on dozens of unelected advisers whose qualifications were dubious and whose advice may have been worse. But the most serious allegations are of corruption on a massive scale in her government.

A friend observes that "the Bhuttos always had a fascination for rich people and for money." But while Bhutto wears fur coats on foreign journeys, she does not drape herself in the ostentatious jewels and glitter favored by Pakistan's gilded lilies. Her lawyer actually complained in court about an opponent's campaign ad that showed her with a bare head, in violation of Muslim custom.

Even anti-Bhutto voters were unready to condemn the Prime Minister as a thief. But it is hard to find anybody in Pakistan who is not convinced that her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, a former small-time developer she married three years ago, has not been using the family name to make megabucks.

The standard explanation for her failure to rein him in is that she's madly in love with him and he knows how to manipulate her emotionally. The pop-psychological version is that she transferred to her dashing, roguish mate the blind adoration she once had for her dashing, roguish father. But the elder Bhutto also made money on the job, as did many generals and bureaucrats before and after. So it is less likely that Bhutto was blind to the transgressions of her family and ministers than that she considered payoffs and influence peddling by allies both a political necessity and a normal perquisite of office.

One of the most damaging charges against her in the courts is that she used millions of dollars in intelligence funds, as well as government aircraft, to deflect a no-confidence vote a year ago. At the time, the Prime Minister was heavily pregnant for the second time in a year, so the masterminding of "operation greasy palm" fell to her husband, a political neophyte but a skilled deal maker who already had an office in the Prime Minister's secretariat. After the successful vote of confidence, Zardari's personal network was enlarged to include elected politicians. But a Bhutto intimate notes that party allies considered the Zardari intervention "a hijacking of the party by an outsider."

Pakistan's press -- newly liberated by Bhutto -- began writing about her husband's business career only a few months into her term. He already had become a kingpin in his hometown of Karachi, issuing orders to politicians and civil servants and placing cronies in key contract-dispensing jobs in public corporations.

Zardari and his father, Hakim Ali Zardari, who headed Parliament's public-accounts committee, were said to be making money in at least three ways: By helping associates secure collateral-free loans from nationalized banks, by collecting cuts on government contracts and by doing land deals. Because the government controls so many economic levers in Pakistan, access to decision makers is a salable commodity, and nobody had better access in recent times than the Zardaris. Bhutto's husband spent the last two weeks of the campaign under arrest. A sympathy vote may well have helped him win a Karachi seat in the National Assembly.

Bhutto and her husband have denied every allegation of personal misconduct. She also dismissed reports that some of her ministers were picking the public's pockets. Bhutto did fire a few advisers in late 1989, after People's Party legislators, fearing a political backlash, staged mock corruption trials of ministers allegedly on the take. But she never carried out a promised cabinet reshuffle and never showed public concern about the corruption issue. One friend who tried to alert her to trouble ahead was told, "But everybody does it."

President Ghulam Ishaq's charge that corruption reached unprecedented heights under Bhutto will never be provable. This is partly because there are no hard figures for comparison and partly because, as one government lawyer puts it, "there is always a missing link" -- the unsigned document, the unrecorded phone call, the unwilling witness. The best estimate of bureaucratic looting in Pakistan, provided by an ex-finance minister five years ago, was $ 2 billion a year. Indexed for inflation and greed, this could have reached at least $ 3 billion, or 7 percent of the country's GNP.

Even if Bhutto and her entourage did not steal more than their predecessors, freely elected leaders should be held to a higher standard. But in any case, corruption and ineffectiveness were only pretexts for the dismissal of the government last summer. The real reason Bhutto was booted out by the President and the Army is that she never understood the realities of Pakistani politics and never practiced the arts of consensus building or power sharing.

The story of Bhutto's 20-month rule is a chronicle of ceaseless conflict with the very people and institutions she needed to help make government work. The President, the Army and the opposition all reciprocated her distrust, and it is not clear whether any of the three was prepared to accept the authority of this meddlesome woman. But it was Bhutto who was most often on the offensive, launching attacks on multiple fronts and pushing her enemies to make common cause against her.

Bad choices. She not only picked too many fights, she picked the wrong ones. She gave in with scarcely a murmur when the Army demanded a 50 percent increase in defense spending and sole control over policy toward Afghanistan. But she went to the wall over the promotion of her military secretary. She was right about the need to consolidate her power. But her political base was too weak and the democratic system too fragile for her to try to topple opposition governments in two provinces and at the same time challenge the President and the Army chief.

At one point, she and President Ghulam Ishaq stopped speaking for months. They resumed business not-quite-as-usual only after mediators negotiated a temporary truce. With an unerring sense of misjudgment and bad timing, Bhutto chose a moment when she and the military were at swords' points over the handling of a near civil war in Sind Province to try to impose her own man as heir apparent to the Army chief. A few weeks later, Army commanders formally decided that Bhutto had to go. The President was putting the final touches on his dismissal speech when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Four days later, on August 6, with world attention conveniently riveted elsewhere, Bhutto was given her walking papers.

The new government, still adjusting to its unexpectedly big victory, has yet to weigh the pros and cons of seeing Bhutto disqualified from politics or even jailed. For now, its new leaders simply talk about the law taking its course. Bhutto, still digesting disaster, decided against boycotting provincial elections on October 27, but she has not yet ruled out taking her election-fraud charges to the streets. Facing an uncertain and even dangerous future, she told U.S. News, with the royal pronoun, "We're young. We have time. But does Pakistan?"

GRAPHIC: Picture, The winner. Nawaz Sharif campaigning against Bhutto, D. Hudson-Sygma; Picture, The loser. Bhutto mounted a fierce campaign, but her sense of entitlement and corruption charges helped sabotage her effort to win re-election, D. Hudson-Sygma; Picture, The arbiters. Unlike Bhutto, Sharif will take office with the Army's blessing, Yves Gellie-Pascal Maitre-Odyssey/Matrix