Tariq Ali has a long article on Bhutto called "Daughter of the West". See this site. The article is quite long but very interesting. A quite different picture emerges of Bhutto from that usually given in the western press although Ali is sympathetic to Bhutto's party's aims. Corruption within the party was rampant during Bhutto's terms as leader of Pakistan. Here is a short quote:
"By the time she was re-elected in 1993, she had abandoned all idea of reform, but that she was in a hurry to do something became clear when she appointed her husband minister for investment, making him responsible for all investment offers from home and abroad. It is widely alleged that the couple accumulated $1.5 billion. The high command of the Pakistan People’s Party now became a machine for making money, but without any trickle-down mechanism. This period marked the complete degeneration of the party. All that shame-faced party members could say, when I asked, was that ‘everybody does it all over the world,’ thus accepting that the cash nexus was now all that mattered. In foreign policy her legacy was mixed. She refused to sanction an anti-Indian military adventure in Kargil on the Himalayan slopes, but to make up for it, as I wrote in the LRB (15 April 1999), her government backed the Taliban takeover in Kabul – which makes it doubly ironic that Washington and London should be promoting her as a champion of democracy."
Of course once Bhutto needed the aid of the US to get back in power she changed her tune on the Taliban and was gung-ho to tackle the radical Islamists in the territories a position that won her a lot of cheerleaders in the US and its allies.
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