I have been reading a lot about Pakistan. It’s been a while since I’ve been there, but in looking through the various posts on the death of Bhutto, I find it interesting to look at the American view of the event, and the reading of those elsewhere (for example, a different reading of Bhutto here). (Warning: this post represents my thoughts not as an academic, as this is most certainly NOT my scholarly area. Just from someone who’s been reading stuff. It’s also sloppy as it’s late, I’m tired, but for some reason not sleeping) .

Allow me to provide what I see as the (admittedly much oversimplified) view of Bhutto’s death (particularly in the US): It represents the failure of democracy in Pakistan and its unlikely realization for years to come. Let me openly state that I am no scholar of Pakistan, but I disagree with the logic of this position. That logic:

1.) Though not openly stated (particularly by liberals), Bhutto represented democracy because of her ties to the West. She was educated at Harvard and Oxford (notice how often this is mentioned). She spent time with Westerns and communicated with and through Western media. This is consistently implied as a democratic “credential”.

2.) Bhutto represented democracy because the majority of her nation were likely to vote for her in the now-postponed January election.

3.) Bhutto represented democracy because of the strong likelihood of her secularizing the nation.

One can even see elements of this logic in the SSRC blog linked to above, which for the most part I find quite insightful. While I have some serious issues with Tariq Ali’s approach (the London Review of Books article, again above, which was written before Bhutto’s death yet has an interesting prickly post-script) I think his thinking is better. Why? Because he thinks about Pakistan and its history, and recognizes Bhutto’s position within that history rather than suggesting her as a figure somehow above it.

Let me be more concrete by returning to the logic above. In the first assumption, ties to the west are thought of as increasing the likelihood of a transition to democracy. This is an empirical question I don’t know the answer to. But I would guess that such ties have a neutral if not slightly negative effect on such transitions insofar as such ties remove leaders from nation-democratic orientations to a reliance on the power provided by such international ties. Anecdotal evidence from other nations seems to support my intuition. But again, I’d like to seem some data on this.

The second simply ignores the history of Bhutto. She tended to be democratic when it was likely to result in her (and her Party, PPP) acquiring power and much less so when it didn’t. That she was likely to be democratically elected doesn’t mean she was pro-democracy. It meant, in my humble opinion, that a democratic political process was the most likely process for her to acquire power. And if her previous periods of power were any indication, “democratic commitment” was fairly modest, at best. Ali makes a good point: that one might question the democratic commitment of a person who is willing to make their child leader for life of the party they used to control (as Bhutto did her son).

As for the secularization thesis (the third point) there are two ways to address this: first, would Bhutto have tried to secularize Pakistan, and second, does secularization lead to democratization. As for the first, Bhutto was certainly wiling to tell the West this. Yet again, her own rule showed the ways in which she consistently mobilized some of the people who seem to have killed her to her political advantage. In fact, many political parties were willing to use violent actors for their political advantage. For the second, again this is in part an empirical question yet is oddly often treated as if it were solely a theoretical one. And more, sometimes either secularization is treated as a concrete thing (where the religion/culture does not matter, only that secularization happens), or that the religion does matter (particularly Islam) yet the vast diversity of practices are largely ignored.

I do not mean this post to badmouth the dead. I think of it less about Bhutto and more about the ways in which, in my view, we tend to sloppily apply available concepts/theories/ideas to contexts we know little about, and therefore get them quite wrong. And in this case, getting them wrong strikes me as having serious consequences. I tend to agree with Fox News at this moment: Pakistan is one of the scariest places on earth right now. Though for me, some of these fears are personal.

Update: It looks like the NYTimes is following my lead.