In some ways Benazir Bhutto’s acute personal sense of destiny appears to have contributed to her death. In numerous situations, she courted danger in a dangerous land, and survived. Doubtless that has an effect. As Churchill said: “There is nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at, without result.”

We note that Benazir Bhutto was killed in the city that CBS reported was home to Osama bin Laden during kidney treatments in 2002. A very dangerous city and country indeed, as Andrew McCarthy said yesterday. Christopher Hitchens remembers Bhutto as an unusual mix of attributes: a woman of physical courage, corruption, hauteur and charm — and perhaps other things just emerging:

It is grotesque, of course, that the murder should have occurred in Rawalpindi, the garrison town of the Pakistani military elite and the site of Flashman’s Hotel. It is as if she had been slain on a visit to West Point or Quantico. But it’s hard to construct any cui bono analysis on which Gen. Pervez Musharraf is the beneficiary of her death. The likeliest culprit is the al-Qaida/Taliban axis, perhaps with some assistance from its many covert and not-so-covert sympathizers in the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. These were the people at whom she had been pointing the finger since the huge bomb that devastated her welcome-home motorcade on Oct. 18.

She would have been in a good position to know about this connection, because when she was prime minister, she pursued a very active pro-Taliban policy, designed to extend and entrench Pakistani control over Afghanistan and to give Pakistan strategic depth in its long confrontation with India over Kashmir. The fact of the matter is that Benazir’s undoubted courage had a certain fanaticism to it. She had the largest Electra complex of any female politician in modern history, entirely consecrated to the memory of her executed father, the charming and unscrupulous Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had once boasted that the people of Pakistan would eat grass before they would give up the struggle to acquire a nuclear weapon.

(He was rather prescient there—the country now does have nukes, and millions of its inhabitants can barely feed themselves.) A nominal socialist, Zulfikar Bhutto was an autocratic opportunist, and this family tradition was carried on by the PPP, a supposedly populist party that never had a genuine internal election and was in fact—like quite a lot else in Pakistan—Bhutto family property…

She always displayed the same unironic lack of embarrassment. How prettily she lied to me, I remember, and with such a level gaze from those topaz eyes, about how exclusively peaceful and civilian Pakistan’s nuclear program was. How righteously indignant she always sounded when asked unwelcome questions about the vast corruption alleged against her and her playboy husband, Asif Ali Zardari…

now the two main legacies of Bhutto rule—the nukes and the empowered Islamists—have moved measurably closer together. This is what makes her murder such a disaster. There is at least some reason to think that she had truly changed her mind, at least on the Taliban and al-Qaida, and was willing to help lead a battle against them…

Perhaps we’ll never really know now if “she had truly changed her mind.” Her other qualities contributed to eliminating that possibility — this was, after all, a woman who had named three specific individuals who were plotting to kill her several months ago, before she had even returned from exile to Pakistan. She came back anyway, apparently heedless of the near inevitability of her demise. What a waste of recklessness that might otherwise have been useful. One possible moral to the story is this: even if you have a well developed sense of your own destiny, perhaps you shouldn’t bet the house on it.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 6:15 am and is filed under General, Religion, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.