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| Mark Steyn: "Benazir Bhutto's return to Pakistan had a mad recklessness about it" |
| 2007-12-27 |
| Benazir Bhutto's return to Pakistan had a mad recklessness about it which give today's events a horrible inevitability. As I always say when I'm asked about her, she was my next-door neighbor for a while - which affects a kind of intimacy, though in fact I knew her only for sidewalk pleasantries. She was beautiful and charming and sophisticated and smart and modern, and everything we in the west would like a Muslim leader to be - though in practice, as Pakistan's Prime Minister, she was just another grubby wardheeler from one of the world's most corrupt political classes. Since her last spell in power, Pakistan has changed, profoundly. Its sovereignty is meaningless in increasingly significant chunks of its territory, and, within the portions Musharraf is just about holding together, to an ever more radicalized generation of young Muslim men Miss Bhutto was entirely unacceptable as the leader of their nation. "EveryoneÂ’s an expert on Pakistan, a faraway country of which we know everything," I wrote last month. "It seems to me a certain humility is appropriate." The State Department geniuses thought they had it all figured out. They'd arranged a shotgun marriage between the Bhutto and Sharif factions as a "united" "democratic" "movement" and were pushing Musharraf to reach a deal with them. That's what diplomats do: They find guys in suits and get 'em round a table. But none of those representatives represents the rapidly evolving reality of Pakistan. Miss Bhutto could never have been a viable leader of a post-Musharraf settlement, and the delusion that she could have been sent her to her death. Earlier this year, I had an argument with an old (infidel) boyfriend of Benazir's, who swatted my concerns aside with the sweeping claim that "the whole of the western world" was behind her. On the streets of Islamabad, that and a dime'll get you a cup of coffee. As I said, she was everything we in the west would like a Muslim leader to be. We should be modest enough to acknowledge when reality conflicts with our illusions. Rest in peace, Benazir. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #8 Only 46% of Pakistanis support Osama bin Ladin? I thought it was more like 85%. I guess the rest think Osama's too Westernized, not Muslim enough, something like that. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2007-12-27 21:10 |
| #7 Steyn has additional thoughts here: When you invent an artificial country, you better be sure that your artificial identity will stick. Pakistan today is not what the British and Jinnah had in mind, nor Ayub Khan, nor Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, nor General Zia, nor Nawaz Sharif. Instead, across 60 years, their failures incubated an identity that would have seemed utterly deranged to even the more excitable Punjabi Muslims of the early 1940s. As Andy noted earlier, according to one recent poll, 46% of Pakistanis support Osama bin Laden. What should be easy to agree is that Pakistan is getting worse. Even those who thought at the time that its creation was one of the most unnecessary mistakes in British imperial policy wouldn't have predicted that a mere half-century later it would be a coup-prone nuclear basket-case exporting both its tribal marriage customs and irredentist jihadism to the heart of the western world. Fifty years ago, Pakistanis emigrating to England and Canada brought with them an essentially Britannic education and a moderate Sufi Islam that was not a barrier to integration. Today they bring a narrow madrassah education and Deobandi Islam, which is deeply hostile to assimilation. In other words, what a "Pakistani" is is profoundly different. I liked Benazir Bhutto very much, but she represented Pakistan's past, and her murder is a horrible confirmation of that fact. |
| Posted by: Mike 2007-12-27 18:00 |
| #6 Right on that MRP. Classic Steyn distillation. |
| Posted by: Classical_Liberal 2007-12-27 14:39 |
| #5 A typical Steynian off-the-cuff comment - brilliant stuff. One can't find anything close to it in the New York Times or the Washington Post. A pity, that. |
| Posted by: mrp 2007-12-27 13:33 |
| #4 If Rice doesn't get booted from State for this disaster, I don't know what will get her fired. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2007-12-27 12:30 |
| #3 State Department's idea.... |
| Posted by: danking70 2007-12-27 12:06 |
| #2 If The Pure turn to fighting amongst themselves, they won't have as much attention for adventuring in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Perhaps we should consider establishing new supply lines from Iraq through Iran... /yes, I know it's an awful lot harder for our guys to do than for me to say. But it looks so neat on the map! |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-12-27 11:47 |
| #1 Pakistan is about to come apart. I see the Afghanistanization or Balkanization of it. We might need to snatch a portion of the country to keep Afghanistan supplied. The Islam War is far from over and about to head into the next chapter. |
| Posted by: US Army 2007-12-27 11:31 |