RS: They could be the key to his survival. In the light of his wife's death and a lot of bad feeling directed towards the U.S. because of the way she met her fate, he has an even more difficult challenge in how to manage the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. Clearly, the U.S. has capability, but the question is can he afford to tap it? It's a little bit like with a married couple and taking money from your mother for that first house; it's not that she won't offer it. The question is can you afford to accept it? It's tricky because part of what people in Pakistan are hoping for is that Pakistan will be able to stand on its own and not have to deal with these often misguided efforts from the U.S. that often create either disastrous or unintended consequences.
AA: Does the Bush camp regard Zardari with contempt?
RS: I don't know if they regard him with contempt. First off, this Bush crowd is out of the door and Zardari is going to have to deal with the next group. There are areas of continuity in the State Department and other parts of the U.S. government, but he has to manage an increasingly contentious conversation between the Pakistani people and the American government. His desire is to be able to be effective in reducing violence and challenging some of the spreading violent Islamic radicalism that is really a force in the region. Is he going to be effective? Does he have the horsepower in terms of both the resources and leadership in a difficult realm?
AA: Surely the outgoing administration realises that the new forward policy in Afghanistan affects Zardari personally and Pakistan.
RS: Right, it does and it will. I'm not sure which lessons the U.S. may be relying on to now be discussing a more significant and largely military engagement in the tribal areas and in Afghanistan. The question is what principles will guide them there. This could be very, very messy and some Nato partners are feeling aggrieved and startled at how swiftly the Taliban and Islamic radicals have reconstituted in that region.
We also have the Pakistani authorities saying they will shoot at Americans. It leaves you dizzy. It's the same situation of force-based and largely military responses on which the U.S. is relying for a solution when lesson after lesson is that it almost never turns out as you are hoping.
AA: Do you think Pakistan can survive as a unitary state?
RS: The key to Pakistan's survival is to come to some reckoning as to how to define human progress and for various factions to say, 'all right for these few areas — and they may be only a few to start — we will try to define that progress together.' The only way for a path forward is to bring the discussion to its essentials, to find the few things we can all agree to define human progress and those are the things we can focus on. And as we focus on them in a unified way, the other areas of dispute and conflict will slowly start to soften.
Even folks in the Islamist community say that even if their son or grandson is a person of faith, I do agree I want them to know what the world is and it should not be a false rendering. I need to be able to read, I need potable water, I need the kind of health care you get in a corner drug store in the West, I need electricity, I need some basics so that the lives of my children are better than my life. When you think of human progress in those simple terms and you say the rest of it you will keep to turning from violence, but these things we will agree upon and work upon together, that is what my book suggests.
AA: Tell us about the time you spent with Benazir before her death.
RS: I first spent time with Bhutto in London. She and I met through a mutual friend and she had read my last book and given copies to many of her friends. So it was like we knew each other from a distance. So we spent an afternoon — it's rendered in the book — at her penthouse in London. After that we started to talk very frequently about many different things. We knew a lot of people in common and also she knew that I was in contact with senior officials inside the U.S. government, including inside the vice president's office and the State Department. So what was occurring was that clearly she was telling me what she was doing and I also was calling through official power in Washington to get context about what may or not be going on, all of it for the book.
Then I saw her in Washington and I was with her on the day that she had her star turn on Capitol Hill and the day she was very concerned about her security and her return to Karachi and was trying to get people inside the U.S. government to take up her cause of self-protection. But also the day she has her conversation with Musharraf when he says mocking her, essentially that her security was based on the state of their relationship. It's something that Bhutto was struck by, she and I talked about that exchange. She said she felt nauseous, realising that this is a four-level chess game and she may not have all the pieces she needs on the board.
What became clear was how Bhutto was responding to the various issues and episodes confronting her. And how improbably she was finding how one door closes and another opens. She was evolving and that even surprised her. She would joke around about this because she knew that my view of this was that she had a very complicated set of problems, including issues of corruption. Bhutto, as she started to embrace the rhetoric of people like Gandhi or Martin Luther King, was startled at how this confused Musharraf. Musharraf's team viewed her as a South Asian political boss who ought to be in a back room sorting out power-sharing arrangements. They couldn't figure it out.
AA: In your book you project her as both an idealist and a corrupt politician. Which was she?
RS: I don't think those things are necessarily in conflict with one another. There are people who have engaged in corrupt practice and who, if they have sufficient self-knowledge, have the capacity to see their lives clearly and sometimes move forward. The fact is that we're dealing with very complex issues of ends and means and there are people who over time begin to understand how important it is to bring probity and justice to both the means and the ends. I think that is exactly at the core of what I see as Bhutto's somewhat improbable leaps forward at the very, very end of her life.
AA: In your book you also tell of a tapped telephone call in which Benazir discusses her Swiss bank accounts. Could you elaborate?
RS: The NSA (National Security Agency) was wiretapping Bhutto and this is no surprise. At one time there were conversations that I discuss in my book, without a specific of a date, where Bilawal and Bhutto had a discussion as to the management of funds in the event of Benazir's demise, including the passing of bank account numbers. Again, you say, 'Oh goodness', this is something the NSA picked up and my understanding from my sources is that it fell into the category of not public or secret things that the U.S. government knows about Bhutto, whether it misconstrues them or not, that then often falls into actions, the driving intent of which Bhutto may not even understand. That's the problem with secrets. One never gets to confront one's accuser.
AA: When it comes to money there is a theory that Benazir and her late brother, Murtaza, fell out over who had access to their father's Swiss accounts.
RS: I don't necessarily subscribe to money as the root of all evil proposition, but it certainly causes enormous complication and can cause enormous conflict especially when its money that's off ledger and not something that is either visible or accountable. But that's one of the twists and turns in the Bhutto drama and how Bhutto ultimately moved toward a bad finish.
AA: Could the U.S. have protected Benazir?
RS: The U.S. did not want Bhutto to perish, but the interplay of what went on was the U.S. putting its emphasis on the wrong areas, trusting things not worth trusting, as opposed to missing opportunities here, and through that neglect allows Bhutto to move forward in an increasingly perilous realm without what could have been U.S. commitment and force behind her protection. I don't know ultimately who killed her, but Bhutto's rise at the end and the growing popularity of her and the PPP (Pakistan People's Party) meant that any power sharing arrangement with Musharraf was all but untenable.
AA: Did Benazir talk openly of who she thought was plotting against her?
RS: We went through lists of names and how the U.S. and other western powers should freeze the accounts of these 30 people. Freeze them immediately, not just threaten to freeze them. And then say to them that if they do the right thing and make sure she makes it alive to election day, or forget about seeing that money again. At that point the way the world really works, one of the elements will kick in where the wives and mistresses of these men will say, 'Are you telling me that my son at Georgetown will have to withdraw a semester, or that I can't shop at Harrods? That's not tenable, do something. Today.' And that would have created some change.
We were all sitting around and it was said half in jest, but it was serious.
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