Forty years later, Bhutto looks darn good

Submitted by Sunil (United States), Apr 26, 2009 at 21:18

Dear Dr Pipes, Worried about the current state of affairs in Pakistan, I came to your site to do some research. I stumbled upon this article. Zulfi Bhutto was simultaneously ridiculed and admired in India in the seventies. He was ridiculed for the extreme passion of his speeches. He was also admired because he was a very well qualified professional and no one could doubt his intelligence.

In the state of affairs that Pakistan is now, Bhutto almost incites a nostalgia. After the 1971 war Bhutto sat down with Indira Gandhi and negotiated a settlement. Almost forty years after those negotiations, the irony now is that from Islamabad to the West Bank there is no leadership in that part of the world with whom you can sit across a table and negotiate. An entire generation in one half of a continent is lost to reckless fundamentalism.

I honestly hope that everyone in these countries who earned a college degree or wrote a poem or drew a painting or solved a math equation drops his hatred of the west and preaches wisdom to his brothers and sisters. The Islam of Samarkand, Baghdad and Cordoba that is so fondly remembered by Muslims did not probably die solely due to foreign conspiracy. Today, the rest of the world at least deserves someone in the Islamic lands with whom we can at least talk.

I say this with as few biases and as much objectivity as I can muster. Thanks for printing this letter.

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