Pakistan

I have written that Benazir Bhutto’s death leaves the West in a difficult predicament and it seems important now to have a look at just what that predicament is. Franklin D Roosevelt said of the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, "He may be a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch." Change him for her and you have what our policy for Pakistan was. Benazir was venal, said to have trousered (or shalwar kameezed) at least $1.5bn but she would have listened to the Western governments – indeed our security services probably have enough on her un-Moslem lifestyle to have kept her obedient for years. And now she is dead.

To see what has been going on - and it has the imprimatur of the West all over it – just imagine if when John Smith died in 1994 it emerged that he had taken the Labour party funds and distributed them among his family and friends, opening accounts in exotic locations, in several of which he was wanted for fraud. And then, in his will, he decrees who the next leader of the Labour Party would be (it would have been Gordon, all those years ago).

After Benazir’s death there will be no leadership election for the Pakistan Peoples Party: it has some talented people but Benazir, described by several newspapers as a martyr for democracy, the woman who said democracy will defeat terrorism, has decided it will be her son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari who will lead. Actually young Billy, who is also full of crap about the value of democracy, is a 19 year old student at university (Oxford) so in the meantime the party will be run by Benazir’s husband (Asif Ali Zardari, a former jailbird, wanted for fraud in several financial centres, known in his (wife’s) heyday in Pakistan as Mr 10%). Oh and a couple of others who will have been paid by the Bhutto family.

The importance of Pakistan, it need hardly be mentioned, is that it is a Muslim country of 165 million people, 70% Sunni, 20% Shia, bordering Afghanistan, the likely home of Osama bin Laden, and it has a nuclear bomb.

But perhaps it isn’t so bad after all: the policy had been to maintain in power an intelligent, educated woman who we thought would do anything the West wanted as long as she was maintained in power. Yes she had a back-story of helping to install the Taliban in Afghanistan but we could forget that (even while British servicemen are dying as a result). No she never did anything for Pakistanis, not even repealing the Hudud law which means a woman who has been raped can be convicted of adultery, but we never cared about Pakistanis or foreign women. Benazir was our sonofabitch.

Now we have a 19 year old, with a Regent who will do what anybody wants as long as there is a billion and a new passport at the end of it. Perhaps western diplomatic policy has come out of this rather well.

But….I just ask…. Is this what we want of our foreign policy? Is it what the people of Pakistan need?