Chapter 1The House on Clifton Road

Foreword

She stood up through the sunroof to wave.

The Land Cruiser was pulling out of Liaquat Bagh in Rawalpindi on the twenty-seventh of December, 2007, and Benazir Bhutto put her head and shoulders out of the roof to acknowledge the crowd, and a young man fired, and a vest packed with ball bearings was detonated. She was fifty-four.

She knew what the risk was with a precision very few politicians ever have. Two months earlier her return from exile had been met in Karachi by a welcome procession that was bombed, killing well over a hundred people. She had walked away from that one. She went on campaigning in open vehicles anyway, because the alternative was campaigning from behind glass in a country where being seen was most of what she had.

I have spent my working life trying to establish, in one place after another, who actually holds power as against who appears to. It is normally difficult. It normally requires months and a great deal of tedium and a certain amount of luck with documents.

In Pakistan the answer was written into the constitution.

For most of her career an amendment gave the president the power to dismiss an elected government at will. Both of Benazir Bhutto's governments ended that way. Neither was voted out. Beside that sat an intelligence service that operated, in practice, as a second and unelected government, with its own foreign policy, its own budget lines and its own view about which civilians were acceptable.

So this is the biography of a woman who was the most famous politician in her country, twice its prime minister, and who governed for under five years in total with a switch on the wall that other people could reach.

That framing is the argument of the book, and it cuts in both directions, which is why I have tried to hold it steadily.

Against her: it does not excuse everything. The corruption allegations against her governments and against her husband were extensive and they were not all inventions of her enemies, however enthusiastically her enemies pursued them. She did not build a modern political party; the PPP remained a dynastic organization held together by a surname, with no internal democracy and no cadre that could function without a Bhutto at the top. She had two chances at office and the institutions she said she wanted, an independent judiciary, a free press, civilian control of the army, were not meaningfully stronger when she left than when she arrived.

For her: a leader operating under a constitutional kill switch, with an intelligence service running its own policy, in a state where the army has governed directly for about half the country's existence, is not a leader with the full range of choices. A great deal of what reads as failure of will was failure of leverage. I have tried to say which was which, case by case, rather than issuing a verdict on the whole.

And there is the fact that no amount of ledger-keeping disposes of. In 1988, in a Muslim-majority country of a hundred million people, a thirty-five-year-old woman took the office of prime minister. Whatever she did or failed to do with it afterwards, that had not been done before, and after it, it had been done.

On sources and on limits.

I conducted no interviews for this book. Her own memoirs exist and are useful and are the account of a politician about herself, which is a genre with rules; I have used them as testimony and flagged where they conflict with the documented record.

On the assassination, I have not named the person who ordered it, because the evidence does not support naming one. What the evidence does support, and what the chapters set out in detail, is that the scene was hosed down within hours, that the investigation that followed was inadequate in ways that went beyond incompetence, and that the security provided to a former prime minister who had already survived one mass-casualty attempt was so far below what the threat required that the failure is itself the most documented fact in the case. A United Nations commission said as much. Who gave the order remains unestablished, and this book leaves it unestablished rather than supplying the satisfying paragraph.

Her line was that democracy is the best revenge. She said it often enough that it has worn down into a slogan. It was not a slogan when she said it first. Her father had been hanged by a general.

Chapter 1 · The House on Clifton Road

The house stood at 70 Clifton Road in Karachi, behind walls high enough to block the noise from the street but not high enough to keep the world from entering. It was a house built for a political family, which meant it was built for receiving. There were rooms where men sat on cushions and drank tea and talked about who would control Sindh. There were rooms where women waited to see whether what the men decided would affect them. There was a courtyard where a girl could play and not yet understand that the conversations happening thirty feet away would determine the shape of her entire life.

Benazir Bhutto was born on June 21, 1953, at Pinto's Nursing Home in Karachi, the first child of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Nusrat Ispahani Bhutto, and the house on Clifton Road was the home to which she was brought. Outside, Karachi was six years into its existence as the capital of a country that was itself only six years old. Pakistan was carved from the body of British India in 1947, and in 1953 the carving was still raw, the borders still contested, the idea of the nation still an argument conducted at high volume in drawing rooms exactly like the one at 70 Clifton Road.

To understand what Benazir Bhutto became, you must first understand what the house represented. It was not a home. It was an assertion. The Bhutto family of Larkana, in upper Sindh, were feudal landlords whose holdings stretched across thousands of acres of irrigated farmland. They were waderas, the Sindhi term for the great landowners who controlled the political and economic life of the countryside, who settled disputes, who determined which families rose and which fell, who collected rents and dispensed favors and maintained, through an intricate web of obligation and patronage, a system of power that predated the British Raj by centuries. The Bhuttos were not the largest family in Sindh, but they were among the most politically sophisticated. They had cooperated with the British when cooperation served them and resisted when resistance served them. They had survived the transition from Raj to independence with their holdings intact.

The house on Clifton Road was what happened when a feudal family decided to become an urban political family. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's father, Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto, had served in the colonial administration and had been knighted by the British. He had supported the Pakistan movement, the campaign for a separate Muslim state, at the critical moment, when it became clear which way the wind was blowing. This was the essential feudal skill: reading the direction of power and positioning yourself accordingly. The Bhuttos had survived the Mughals, the Sikhs, the British, and now they would survive independence. The house on Clifton Road was the physical expression of that survival. It said: we are here. We are not going anywhere. We have adjusted to the new order as we adjusted to every order that came before.

Into this house Benazir was born, and the first fact of her life was that she was a girl.

This mattered in ways both obvious and subtle. In the feudal culture of Sindh, male heirs were the primary vehicles of dynastic continuity. A son would inherit the land, the political relationships, the obligations and privileges that constituted the family's position. A daughter would be married off to another family, creating an alliance but not extending the direct line of Bhutto power. The Sindhi feudal system was not unusual in this respect — feudal systems across the world have placed female heirs in secondary positions — but in Sindh the system was particularly elaborate and particularly rigid. The wadera culture determined not just property inheritance but political inheritance. The great families owed their power to their control of water, of land, of tenant farmers who voted as their landlords instructed and who depended on the landlord's goodwill for the resolution of disputes, for access to credit, for the thousand daily necessities that the feudal patron controlled. Political power in this system was inseparable from land, and land was inherited by sons.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto wanted sons. He would eventually have them: Murtaza was born in 1954, Shah Nawaz in 1958. But Benazir came first, and her father's response to her arrival established a pattern that would define her life.

He treated her as if she were the heir.

This was not an act of liberal feminism. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was many things, brilliant, charismatic, manipulative, cruel, visionary, reckless, but he was not a feminist in any ideological sense. He treated his first-born as the heir because that was what his ambition required. He was building something larger than a feudal estate. He was building a political movement, and eventually a government, and he understood instinctively that the most powerful political asset a leader can possess is a family member who is absolutely, unconditionally loyal. Benazir's gender, in Zulfikar's calculation, was not a liability. It was an opportunity. A daughter who was educated, articulate, and devoted to her father could be something a son might not be: completely trusted. Sons had their own ambitions. Daughters, in the Sindhi feudal system, served the family.

The calculation was cold, and it was also, in its way, a gift. Because Zulfikar decided to educate Benazir as he would have educated a son, she received an education that very few Pakistani girls of her generation could have imagined. She attended the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Karachi, a school run by Irish nuns that served the city's elite. She learned English before she was fully fluent in Urdu. She read British history and memorized British poetry and absorbed, without fully understanding it, the British colonial idea that education was the gateway to power. The nuns were strict. The curriculum was demanding. The other girls came from similar families, the daughters of generals, industrialists, senior bureaucrats, and the school functioned as a training ground for the women who would marry the men who would run Pakistan.

Benazir was being trained for something different, though she did not yet know it.

The critical relationship was with her father, and to understand that relationship you must understand Zulfikar Ali Bhutto himself. He was born in 1928 in Larkana, the son of Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto, and he was educated at Berkeley and Oxford. At Berkeley he studied political science; at Oxford he read law. He returned to Pakistan in the early 1950s with an education that set him apart from nearly every other politician in the country, with the possible exception of the aging founders of the Pakistan movement, most of whom had been trained in London. Zulfikar was young, ambitious, and possessed of a particular kind of intelligence: he could read a room the way his ancestors had read the weather, understanding which way the currents were flowing and positioning himself to ride them.

He entered politics as a protege of Field Marshal Ayub Khan, who had seized power in a military coup in 1958. The military takeover had civilian precedents, the Governor-General had dismissed Prime Minister Nazimuddin in 1953 and dissolved the Constituent Assembly in 1954, and it established the pattern that would define Pakistani politics for the rest of the century: the military as the ultimate arbiter of power, civilians serving at the pleasure of the generals. Zulfikar understood this pattern from the beginning. He did not resist it. He used it. He served in Ayub Khan's cabinet as Minister of Commerce, then as Minister of Industries, then as Foreign Minister. He was the youngest minister in the government. He was also, by nearly universal agreement, the most talented.

What Zulfikar understood, and what he taught his daughter, was that power in Pakistan had a geography. It flowed from certain institutions: the military, the civil service, the feudal landholding class, the intelligence services, and, increasingly, the religious establishment. It pooled in certain cities: Rawalpindi, where the military was headquartered; Islamabad, where the bureaucracy sat; Lahore, where the lawyers and the intellectuals gathered; Karachi, where the money was. A successful politician had to manage all of these pools simultaneously, drawing power from each without becoming captive to any. This was the essential lesson of Pakistani politics, and Zulfikar taught it to Benazir the way other fathers taught their daughters to ride bicycles. He did it by example, and he did it by narration.

From the time she was old enough to sit in a room and listen, Benazir was present at political discussions. Her father did not shoo her away. He explained what was happening. When the government changed a policy, he explained why. When a rival was promoted, he explained the calculation behind it. When the military made a move, he explained what it meant. He was, in effect, giving her a seminar in the mechanics of Pakistani power, and the seminar began when she was five or six years old.

Benazir recalled decades later that her father would explain what "they" were trying to do — and what "we" must do in response. The "we" was significant. It enrolled her. It made her a participant in the family's political project before she was old enough to understand what the project was.

The household itself was a political education. Visitors came constantly, politicians, military officers, journalists, foreign diplomats, tribal leaders from Sindh and Balochistan. The house on Clifton Road was a kind of permanent political salon, and Benazir grew up watching her father work a room. She watched him flatter, persuade, threaten, and charm. She watched him assess each visitor's importance and adjust his behavior accordingly. She watched him give someone the full force of his attention, leaning in, making eye contact, speaking as if the two of them were the only people in the world, and she watched him cut someone dead with a single word when they had ceased to be useful. These were lessons in the technology of personal power, and she absorbed them the way children absorb language: not by studying the rules but by hearing them spoken, over and over, until the patterns were embedded.

Nusrat Bhutto, Benazir's mother, was a different kind of education. Nusrat was born Nusrat Ispahani in 1929 in the Iranian city of Isfahan, into a family of Iranian merchants who had established themselves in Karachi as part of the commercial migration that connected the Shia Muslim communities of Iran, Iraq, and South Asia. Her family background was different from the Bhuttos' — they were not feudal landlords but traders, urban rather than rural, Persian-speaking rather than Sindhi — and the difference was visible in Nusrat's bearing and manner, which had a cosmopolitan sophistication that the feudal culture of Sindh did not produce. She was beautiful in a way that Karachi in the 1940s would have recognized as distinctively Iranian: high cheekbones, dark eyes, a quality of composure that read as confidence rather than reserve. She met Zulfikar in Karachi and married him in 1951, a match that combined the Bhutto feudal power with the Ispahani commercial networks and that represented, in its way, exactly the kind of strategic alliance-building that the Sindhi wadera system prized.

Where Zulfikar worked the men, Nusrat worked the women, and in Pakistani politics this was not a secondary role. The women's networks, the family connections, the gossip, the social intelligence about who was married to whom and who owed what to whom, were as important as the formal political structures. Nusrat understood this. She ran the household as a political operation, and she taught Benazir the feminine dimension of power: how to dress, how to present yourself, how to be gracious without being submissive, how to convey authority through bearing and manner rather than through direct command.

Nusrat would prove, during the years of Zia's dictatorship, to be a more formidable political figure than anyone had anticipated, including Zia himself. After Zulfikar's execution, she stepped into the formal leadership of the PPP with a courage that was both genuine and strategic, becoming the party's public face during the years when Benazir was imprisoned and unavailable. She organized protests, gave speeches, visited party offices across the country to demonstrate that the organization survived its founder's death. She was imprisoned herself, repeatedly, and the combined imprisonment of mother and daughter became one of the most powerful symbols of the regime's brutality in the eyes of the international human rights community. Nusrat's leadership of the PPP during those years was not brilliant — she lacked Benazir's political sophistication and her experience of foreign capitals — but it was steady, and steadiness was what the situation required.

The combination of Zulfikar's political education and Nusrat's social education would prove formidable. Benazir would grow up to be a woman who could address a crowd of a million people with the confidence of a natural leader and then sit in a room with tribal elders and defer to them in the precisely correct way. She could be commanding and deferential, Western and Eastern, secular and faithful. These were not contradictions. They were skills, and they were learned in the house on Clifton Road.

But there was another lesson being taught in that house, one that Benazir would not fully understand until much later: the lesson of what power costs.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was not a gentle man. He was a man of enormous appetites, for power, for pleasure, for recognition, for control. He drank. He had affairs. He treated subordinates with a casual cruelty that sometimes crossed the line into genuine sadism. He could be warm and generous with his family one hour and cold and dismissive the next. His intelligence made him contemptuous of people he considered his intellectual inferiors, which was most people. His ambition made him ruthless. His charm made him dangerous, because people trusted him and then discovered that his loyalty extended precisely as far as his interests.

Benazir saw all of this. She saw her mother's pain. She saw the tension in the house when Zulfikar came home late, when his mood was dark, when his temper was sharp. She saw the servants' fear. She saw the way political allies were embraced and then discarded. And she made a choice that many children of charismatic, difficult fathers make: she chose her father. She chose to see the brilliance and not the cruelty, the vision and not the vanity, the courage and not the recklessness. She chose, in other words, to love him, and that love became the most powerful force in her life, more powerful than her own ambition, more powerful than her political convictions, more powerful, ultimately, than her instinct for self-preservation.

The house on Clifton Road was where this love was forged. In the courtyard where she played, in the drawing room where she listened, in the dining room where her father held forth on the fate of nations and included her in the conversation as if she were a colleague rather than a child, in all of these spaces, the essential architecture of Benazir Bhutto's character was constructed. She would be brilliant. She would be brave. She would be loyal to her father and to his legacy beyond all reason. She would inherit his ambition, his charisma, and his capacity for self-deception. She would inherit his enemies. And she would inherit the central question of his life, which was also the central question of hers: What does it take to hold power in Pakistan, and what does it do to the person who holds it?

In 1953, the year of her birth, the answer was already taking shape. Pakistan was a country where the military had already intervened once and would intervene again. It was a country where the feudal landowners held enormous power but were slowly losing their monopoly to an emerging urban middle class. It was a country where the religious establishment was gaining influence, pushing for a more Islamic state against the secular vision of the founders. It was a country where corruption was not an aberration but a system, the way things actually worked, as opposed to the way the constitution said they should work. And it was a country where women were, in the formal structures of power, almost entirely invisible.

Benazir Bhutto would spend her life trying to become visible in this country. She would succeed, spectacularly and tragically. But first she had to leave it.

The house on Clifton Road was where the story began. But the story would not stay there. It would go to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and to Oxford, England, and to the death cells of Rawalpindi, and to the prime minister's residence in Islamabad, and to exile in London and Dubai, and finally back to Rawalpindi, to a rally in Liaquat Bagh park, where, on December 27, 2007, a man with a gun and a bomb ended it.

The house on Clifton Road would outlast almost everything else. The family scattered. Zulfikar was hanged in 1979. Shah Nawaz died in Cannes in 1985. Murtaza was shot by police in Karachi in 1996. Benazir was assassinated in Rawalpindi in 2007. Nusrat, who had been the family's political spine through the worst of the Zia years, spent the last decade of her life in the slow dissolution of Alzheimer's disease, the disease stripping away, year by year, the memories that had made her who she was. She spent her last years in Dubai, where she could receive medical attention unavailable in Pakistan. She died in October 2011, at the age of eighty-two, in a country that was not hers, unable to recognize the grandchildren who visited her, unable to name the husband whose name she had carried and whose legacy she had fought to protect. The end of Nusrat's life was, in its quiet tragedy, the end of a generation: the generation that had known Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the flesh, had heard him speak in the drawing rooms of 70 Clifton Road, had believed in him and suffered for that belief and outlasted the regime that killed him, only to lose everything, one by one, in the slow accumulation of years.

The house on Clifton Road became, in the years after Benazir's assassination, a site of PPP pilgrimage and party symbolism — the physical origin point of the dynasty's political narrative. Party workers visited it. Journalists photographed it. Politicians referenced it in speeches. The walls that the young Benazir had grown up behind, absorbing lessons about power and loyalty and the price of ambition, had become the walls of a political monument. The political conversation that had taken place in those rooms — about Pakistan's future, about the military's grip, about who would control Sindh and who would answer to whom — was still ongoing, decades later, conducted by different voices in different cities, but addressing the same unresolved questions that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had argued about in the house where he raised his daughter to change the world.

In 1953, there was only the house, and the family, and a girl absorbing the lessons of power before she could name them.