The lesson is that everyone who wants to understand politics needs to research stories for possible lies, misrepresentations, or relevant omissions. This is particularly true regarding Middle East politics.
Benazir Bhutto’s Mother is from IranDuring the 1971–1972 academic year, Benazir Bhutto and I were classmates at Harvard University in a Persian (Farsi) language course. With only four students taking the course, we learned Persian sitting at a small round table in the professor’s office. Benazir was studying Persian because her mother, Nusrat Bhutto (or Begum Nusrat Bhutto; maiden name: Begum Nusrat Ispahani) is from a Kurdish region of Iran. I was studying Persian because my wife Badri is from Iran. Benazir accepted my wife’s invitation for a Persian dinner at our Peabody Terrace (Harvard University married student apartment buildings) apartment. Patricia “Tricia” Nixon Cox, daughter of President Richard Nixon and her husband, Edward Finch Cox (a Harvard Law School student) resided also at Peabody Terrace during that academic year.
While I have seen some of her Harvard classmates interviewed on American television programs, I have not heard anyone mention Benazir’s Iranian heritage or studies of Farsi at Harvard. Benazir Bhutto was passionate about politicsAn American television network reported that Benazir became interested in politics only later in life. This is totally false. Even as an undergraduate student at Harvard University, Benazir possessed a strong interest in politics. She studied Comparative Government at Harvard. I accompanied Benazir to attend the Harvard University filming of a television program on the subject of Pakistani politics.
From 1971 to 1973, Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was the President of Pakistan. Benazir adored and emulated her father. Benazir told me and other Harvard classmates that she would become the prime minister of Pakistan someday. At Harvard, many students addressed her by her nickname “Pinky”, a nickname related to her socialist political views.
Political abuses by the major political families of Pakistan
After leaving Harvard University, I joined First National City Bank (now Citibank). At Citibank’s training center in Beirut, Lebanon, a Citibank colleague invited me to stay at his home if I ever visited Pakistan. On a trip returning to work for Citibank in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, I flew from Tehran to Karachi on IranAir, possibly the only airline at that time stopping in both Karachi and in Bombay. In Karachi, I stayed at the home of the father of my Citibank colleague.
My Citibank colleague’s father was a wealthy businessman who had been released from prison shortly before my arrival at his home. He had been jailed on the charge telling an employee that the employee could not read a newspaper during work hours. While in prison, he was tortured. The real reason for his imprisonment was that he did not support the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), the political party founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Instead, he was a member of a competing political family, the Soomro family.
Contrary to the American media’s claims of periods of Pakistani democracy, there have been abuses of power even during periods with elected leaders.
Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Power, and the Execution of Bhutto’s Father
For 19 years (October 1958 to July 1977), Benazir Bhutto’s father had been actively associated with Pakistan’s nuclear program. Ousted from power in a coup, and while imprisoned, he wrote If I Am Assassinated.
The entire book is available for free downloading. If you truly want to understand America’s current attacks upon Iran for Iran’s nuclear power program, then you should read this free book. For example, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto wrote:Dr. Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State for the United States, has a brilliant mind. He told me that I should not insult the intelligence of the United States by saying that Pakistan needed the reprocessing plant for her energy needs. In reply, I told him that I will not insult the intelligence of the United States by discussing the energy needs of Pakistan, but in the same token, he should not discuss the plant at all.The General got the lemon —‘limbo’— from the President of France. Pakistan got the ‘ladu’. PNA got the ‘halva’. I got the death sentence. What difference does my life make now when I can imagine eighty million of my countrymen standing under the nuclear cloud of a defenceless sky?
Kissinger warned Zulfikar Ali Bhutto that if Pakistan continued with its nuclear programme ‘the Prime Minister would have to pay a heavy price.’
Christopher Hitchens, in Chapter 4 of The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001), covered the genocide in Bangladesh (East Pakistan) ignored by the top levels of the American government, but did not cover the execution of Benazir Bhutto’s father.
Historians need to research the issue of why Benazir Bhutto would deal with the Pakistani military or the American government after the execution of her father. On December 28, 2007, Tariq Ali offered this explanation:
And I think by this time she had become a very different person politically from what she had been earlier and had decided that she didn’t want to be on the wrong side of history, so to speak. She more or less said that to me. And she realized or she thought that the only way to survive in this world was basically to do the bidding of the army at home and Washington abroad, two institutions which had led to the—which had basically bumped off her dad in 1979 and which were not going to do her any favors.
