Getting Away with Murder: Benazir Bhutto’s Assassination and the Politics of Pakistan

On December 27, 2007, a suicide bomber fired three shots at Pakistan’s former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, at an election rally in Rawalpindi before detonating explosives. Based on his year-long inquiry into Bhutto’s assassination, U.N. assistant secretary general Muñoz (The Dictator’s Shadow) offers a well-researched account of Pakistan’s politics and the difficulties his commission faced during the investigation. To contextualize Bhutto’s assassination, Muñoz explores Pakistan’s turbulent history, including other unsolved political assassinations; the dominance of the military and intelligence services; the country’s longstanding, often acrimonious alliance with the U.S.; rivalries in the charismatic Bhutto family; General Musharraf and Bhutto’s mutual antipathy; and the rise of the Taliban and global terrorism. Muñoz raises suspicions about the role of Musharraf’s government and the military, noting that the police, under higher orders, hosed down the crime scene shortly after the blast, didn’t request an autopsy, and rushed to charge Baitullah Mehsud, “in association with Al-Qaida,” for the murder on little evidence. Though stopping short of fingering Musharraf, the author nevertheless says Musharraf bears “political and moral responsibility” by failing to provide Bhutto with adequate security when she returned to Pakistan after a nine-year exile. Though this book could have been more tightly edited, it nevertheless provides valuable insights—based on hundreds of interviews, documents, news reports, and astute observations—on Pakistan’s increasingly unstable condition. 10 illus. Agent: Fredrica S. Friedman, Fredrica S. Friedman & Co. (Dec.)