Bhutto at the Brink : She’s Private, Western Educated and Aristocratic, but Could Benazir Bhutto Lead Islamic Pakistan?

LARKANA, Pakistan —  Benazir Bhutto’s face softened into a broad smile as she recalled her college days in America. They were free-spirited years--the height of student activism, the anti-war movement and the loose pop culture of the early ‘70s. And Bhutto was just another face on campus at Harvard University.

“They were the best years of my life,” the 35-year-old Bhutto said reflectively in the sitting room of her sprawling ancestral family home here in the Pakistani desert town of Larkana.

“It was the anonymity. No one really knew who I was. Hardly anyone even knew where Pakistan was, let alone that my father was prime minister.

“I do so relish my privacy.”

That was four months ago, during an interview with The Times in the heat of Pakistan’s debilitating summer, a more peaceful time when Bhutto was quietly polishing her years-long strategy to unseat the military regime that overthrew and hanged her father 11 years before.

But now, such dreams of solitude and anonymity are all but gone for the Harvard graduate, who last week emerged as one of Pakistan’s most powerful political forces, a leader who now stands on the brink of becoming the first woman ever to serve as prime minister in the Islamic world.

Bhutto, who once slipped in and out of Pakistan’s rural and urban airports without so much as a glance in the two years she spent bringing her crusade to the Pakistani people, was mobbed in Karachi last Thursday night by throngs of reporters from throughout the world and a team of uniformed airport police. Just a few years ago, police were more likely to be escorting her to prison cells or house arrest.

This time, she was escorted to the airport VIP lounge, where, in a press conference that was broadcast worldwide, she issued her claim to form Pakistan’s new government on the basis of her party’s victory in last Wednesday’s national parliamentary elections.

Most Often Asked Questions

Whether or not Pakistan President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who holds unchallenged constitutional power to select the new prime minister, will choose Bhutto and her Pakistan People’s Party to run the nation is still undecided. But already, the most-asked questions among international diplomats, political analysts and the Pakistani people themselves are: Just who is this enigmatic young political leader and what kind of government would she actually lead?

The questions are critical for the United States and Pakistan’s other close Western allies, who have relied heavily on Pakistan for 11 years under its late leader, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, to play a front-line role against Soviet expansionism in Afghanistan and to protect Western interests in South Asia and the Persian Gulf.

Bhutto has struck a moderate and often pro-American tone. But many American and Pakistani conservatives harbor deep fears that, despite her frequent and unequivocal denials, she ultimately will fall victim to her more radical supporters and pursue the socialist policies of her father, former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, if she comes to power.

What is more, many Pakistanis fear an era of revenge, as the second generation of Bhutto leaders hunts down and punishes the former generals and judges responsible for the previous one’s downfall and execution.

Lack of Experience

And many analysts simply worry about the potential naivete and lack of experience of a political leader who has yet to serve in office or hold so much as a full-time job.

But in a series of interviews and informal talks with The Times in her past several months on the campaign trail, Bhutto has stressed often that, if she does come to power, hers would not be a regime of vengeance and vindictiveness. And she insisted that her ability to manage Pakistan through its most critical time since independence is grounded in the intimate knowledge she has gained of her nation and the world through her years at Harvard and later Oxford, as well as simply by being her father’s daughter.

“Let us bury the dark shadows of the past,” she said at her comfortable new home in suburban Karachi last month when asked how deeply she is affected by the ghost of Zia, the late military ruler who was her family’s personal nemesis before he was killed in a mysterious plane crash last August.

“Let us move into the 21st Century. There is no time for vengeance. The challenge that we see is to take Pakistan into the new millennium as a newly unified nation with a clear national identity, and to transform Pakistan into the new economic miracle of Asia.”

But Bhutto has consistently been realistic about the depth of that challenge.

Echoing present cabinet ministers who say the nation’s $13-billion foreign debt and its rising inflation and unemployment are pushing it near the edge of economic disaster, she said: “Frankly, the economy is in a shambles . . . because Zia has mortgaged an entire generation of Pakistanis to the World Bank and the international lending community.”

Invariably, the issue of Pakistan’s economy then leads Bhutto naturally to her opinion of the United States, a nation that supported the Zia regime with billions of dollars in foreign aid that Bhutto has long blamed for perpetuating Zia’s often harsh, and later, unpopular rule.

In an effort to allay lingering fears in Washington that the younger Bhutto, who was deeply affected by her early years as a Vietnam War-era student at Harvard and her later years of imprisonment in Pakistan and eventual exile in London, will turn on America if she comes to power, Bhutto has actively been courting American support for her cause in recent months.

Publicly, her comments on America have been nothing but positive.

“We believe the United States has a tremendous role to play in the development of Pakistan,” Bhutto said in the interview in Larkana last summer. And, in a subsequent interview on the campaign trail last week, she added: “I certainly hope we continue to have good relations with the United States, and that they continue to help us.”

She also has stressed that she has simply abandoned many of her father’s policies because they no longer apply to Pakistan today.

“We have certainly revised and reassessed many of the party’s previous policies,” she said in one informal chat, later adding: “In politics, to survive, you have to keep a center of gravity, and that center of gravity keeps changing according to political, economic social changes in one’s society.”

Solving the Rhetoric

Such comments, though, have not reassured many diplomatic and political analysts here who have been trying to cut through the abstract rhetoric of Bhutto’s comments and speeches to assess precisely the hue and composition of a Benazir Bhutto government.

“What a Benazir-led government would look like is still totally unclear,” one senior Western diplomat said. “What most of us have been struck by is the lack of any strong, potential cabinet ministers in her party.

“And in many ways, that’s an extension of her personality. She doesn’t like being challenged. She doesn’t like being criticized.”

In recent weeks, many of Bhutto’s own party workers, some embittered by her decision to favor wealthy, powerful candidates who could win over her own longtime party faithful for several seats in last Wednesday’s legislative elections, also complained that Bhutto is surrounded by sycophants.

“Sometimes, you get the feeling she has no idea what it’s like to be a poor Pakistani living in a mud village,” said one party worker, who asked not to be identified. “She says her government would work principally for the betterment of the poor, but how can she when it seems she has no grasp of what being poor in Pakistan is all about?”

Campaign Style

And Bhutto’s style of campaigning during her recent nationwide barnstorming tour seemed to bolster that image.

Not once did she campaign on foot. She usually addressed the massive crowds who jammed parks and roadside bazaars to see her from atop protected stages, from private railroad cars or from inside a late-model Jeep, poking her head through the sun roof and delivering short speeches to the showers of rose petals and cheers.

Occasionally, Bhutto also displayed what seemed like an aloofness and arrogance, a trait long-time observers here said is common among leaders in the Indian subcontinent, among them the late Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

As she started off on one rural tour in her home province of the Sindh last week, a road tour on which her young, entrepreneurial husband, Asif Zardari, actually drove the Jeep himself, Bhutto spent the first hour or so reading her recently released autobiography (a work scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster in the United States in the spring), almost oblivious to the crowds cheering for her along the roadside.

Personal friends and close advisers brushed aside such criticism, blaming most such behavior on Bhutto’s weakened physical state.

Her First Child

She began her campaign just weeks after giving birth by Caesarean section to her first child and was actually forced to cancel the first week of her election tour because of a kidney infection. Accustomed more to her years of solitude in prison, house arrest or exile, Bhutto’s voice also suffered from her scores of speeches, and her fair skin turned painfully red from her many outdoor public meetings in the broiling sun.

Still, even her closest friends confided that Bhutto had to learn much about her own culture and country after she returned from exile in England in 1986.

“I think she has become much more mature now,” said one close family friend who asked not to be identified by name. “She has started to understand the people of Pakistan. You must understand that most of her time since 1977 was spent in detention or exile. She had to get to know her people again. She had to learn to speak to them and understand them again. And that’s an ongoing process.”

A diplomat in Islamabad, who has studied Bhutto during much of her last two years, added that the time since her return from exile also has helped her grow personally and as a leader.

Inherited Traits

“She has changed a lot,” the diplomat said. “She came back and thought she could call her people out into the streets and bring down Zia’s government overnight.

“It didn’t work out that way, and she learned a lot from that. But there is still the sense of stubbornness and arrogance in her, traits she inherited from her father. And it is really those traits that continue to trouble Pakistan’s allies and the senior officers of the army, which, after all, is still the most powerful institution in the country.”

Asked whether Bhutto would be vindictive if she comes to power, or bitter enough to sponsor a violent protest campaign if she does not, though, another family friend said, “It is true that her father raised her not as a daughter, but as a son. And it is also true that her entire life has been her party, her politics and her father.

“But what Benazir has been fighting for all along is democracy, and she is sincere to a fault to that cause. Viciousness and vindictiveness are no more in her than they are in the principles of democracy.

“Benazir simply is not a person who could say, ‘Kill him.’ ”

But the ultimate enigma of Benazir Bhutto’s life at the moment is her personal insistence that her new role in the halls of Pakistani power politics is a reluctant one--that, and her love of privacy.

Never Wanted Politics

Relaxing in the sitting room at her ancestral home four months ago, she confided that she never wanted to be in politics at all.

“I wanted to be the editor of a newspaper,” she said, “because I think you can influence people in that way without having to thrust yourself onto the center of the stage.”

Politics, she said, “is not something that I relish or enjoy . . . and I have always been apprehensive about the toll that politics takes. I had wanted something much safer.”

And at the peak of her recent, 3-week blur of speeches and mass hero worship, Bhutto told one interviewer that she still cannot imagine herself a career politician.

“My main motivation was to see democracy in the country, and that has not yet happened,” she said. “If democracy does come, I certainly don’t think I would like to be all my life in politics.”

When asked how long she would remain at the center of the stage she claimed to dislike so much, though, Bhutto smiled and said simply, “Only time can tell.”