Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West
By Benazir Bhutto
Simon & Schuster £17.99

If she had not raised her head out of her armoured car on December 27, Benazir Bhutto would, in all likelihood, be heading today for a third term as prime minister of Pakistan. Instead, it has been her assassination that has dominated the election campaign. Her ghostly image, a pale face shrouded by a white scarf, looks down from billboards; her last speech, recorded that afternoon in Rawalpindi, crackles out of loudspeakers.

When the results come in from polling stations tonight, it will become clear whether the Pakistan People’s party can survive the loss of the woman who led it for three decades. Bhutto inherited the party from her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, an elected prime minister executed by an earlier US-backed dictator, and later became its “chairperson for life”. She may not have believed in internal party democracy, but she believed in democracy for Pakistan.

In Reconciliation, which has been posthumously published, she has set down the beliefs that, she says, motivated her to return to Pakistan from a comfortable exile in Dubai. She explains why, in the face of threats to her life, she left her husband and three children to wrest power from the opportunistic politicians that supported President Pervez Musharraf’s regime.

It is, in parts, grippingly told. On her return to Karachi on October 18, a man tries to thrust an infant into her arms. He cannot reach Bhutto, who is standing on the top of an armoured bus, but passes the baby through the crowds towards her. Her guards intervene, convinced that the baby’s clothes are lined with plastic explosives. This was the life ahead of her.

The book has much less of the self-pity that marred her autobiography, Daughter of the East. It is a hard-headed, angry and convincing analysis of why Pakistan, like many other Muslim countries, has struggled to establish viable democratic institutions. There is, she says, enough blame to go around, with the lion’s share reserved for US policy and the Muslim elites that “play the west like a fiddle”.

In a tour of the globe, she describes a clear pattern of perceived self-interest trumping the values of democracy. For the west, democracy is a selectively applied, non-universal value that is central to foreign policy only when it does not interfere with higher priorities, such as anti-communism or the war on terror. In countries that are not strategically important, such as Burma, the west enforces its democratic creed “quite enthusiastically”, organising trade embargoes and other forms of political isolation. In those that are, the west’s commitment to democracy “can often be more platitude than policy”. Double standards breed cynicism about western motives.

Bhutto answers the critics who argued that her willingness to negotiate a “transition to democracy” with Mr Musharraf when others were seeking to oust him was a sell-out of the opposition movement. Casting herself as an “idealist without illusions”, like John F. Kennedy, she describes democracy as a “continuum”. Pakistanis need to be “realistic and pragmatic” in accepting that progress will come in incremental steps, not leaps.

“When confronted with tyranny, one is tempted to go to the barricades directly, when pragmatism would dictate exhausting other potential (and peaceful) remedies,” she writes, in a passage many opposition leaders and civil society activists may find self-serving. “As I have grown in maturity and experience, I remain as strongly committed to the cause but more patient in finding means to achieve goals peacefully.”

Bhutto devotes the rest of the book to an attack on Samuel Huntington and other civilisational “clashers”, as she calls them. A self-styled “reconciliationist”, she sees the most significant clash of our era as not between Islam and the west, but rather the internal fight within Muslim states between the forces of modernity and moderation and the agents of fanaticism.

Western support for military regimes with little interest in democracy contributes to the frustration of Muslims. This leads to feelings of hopelessness, inadequacy and also to the hatred that feeds extremism and terrorism. Providing incentives for democratic transitions in authoritarian states, she argues, is not only morally right, but also in the interest of the west.

The great loss for Pakistan, in particular, is that, for all her faults, there is no one left in national politics who seems able to articulate this self-evident truth as well as she did. Reconciliation breaks little ground as a work of political science. But her central message – that only a democratically elected government, however imperfect, can give Pakistan a fighting chance of tackling extremism – cannot be repeated too often, especially to the occupants of the White House.

The writer is the FT’s south Asia bureau chief