Politics

Interview with Benazir Bhutto

By Dweep Chanana ⋅ August 10, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅ Post a comment

YaleGlobal Online is carrying an interview (full transcript)with Benazir Bhutto, on her (not so) secret discussions with Musharraf earlier this year. For Indians it makes interesting reading on two counts.

First, she talks of abandoning a policy of “strategic depth” in Pakistan, as a hedge against Indian influence. Instead:

She said that she rejected the policy of Pakistani interference in Afghanistan for military advantage in confronting India: “I want to end that policy of strategic depth….. I think for us it is much better to have an Afghanistan that is peaceful, that allows us to trade with it, that has good relations with all its neighbors.”

The second interesting departure from current policy is revealed by her answer to a question on the Indo-US Nuclear Deal:

I hope that at some stage we are able to be offered a similar civil nuclear cooperation, but I also want to take my generation away from the early generations’ view of tit-for-tat with India. We cannot keep competing with the Jones’s. We have to identify our own core interests. We need to pursue our core interests and not seek to so overextend ourselves that we begin to collapse from within. I think that is when the policy of strategic depth has done. It is threatening Pakistan from within and today if I risk my life to go back to my country; I do it because I see the threat within. And I want to try and help my people and help my country avert disaster.

Whether this is mere rhetoric or not, it is important, for it is an approach that is forward-looking in abandoning previous experience, and recognizes that destabalizing states (e.g. Afghanistan) is self-defeating. And it is pragramtic, so much so that her words are worth repeating:

We have to identify our own core interests. We need to pursue our core interests and not seek to so overextend ourselves that we begin to collapse from within.

India too could learn something from that, particularly in its emerging relations with China.