Ron Suskind, author of The One Percent Doctrine, claims in a new book that Pervez Musharraf gave an ominous warning to the late Benazir Bhutto in a September 2007 phone conversation, telling her: “You should understand something…Your security is based on the state of our relationship.”  [Benazir spoke to Musharraf on her cell phone, while in the late Congressman Tom Lantos' office.]

Suskind’s book, The Way of the World, was released today.  Particularly compelling portions have been reported on CNN.  Suskind’s reporting is controversial, though his sourcing is seen as meticulous.  He’s a Pullitzer Prize winner.

Update: 1:59AM (08/06) –

• I purchased the book last night, wrote a brief summary, and provided a lengthy set of Pakistani-related excerpts.  Unfortunately, all that was lost and I’m not sure how.  So what follows is a crude reconstruction of what I originally produced.  In the end, you should read Suskind’s book yourself.  It weaves a beautiful narrative of the microcosmic struggles of real ‘characters’ to be human (who include Benazir and a young Pakistani working in DC) and with the more macrocosmic challenges of extremism/terrorism and U.S. hegemony.

Some Pakistan-related claims in the book:

• The Bush administration’s Pakistan policy is the product of a rivalry between Vice President Cheney’s office and the State Department team of Condoleeza Rice, John Negroponte, and Richard Boucher.  Rice’s team came up with the Bhutto-Musharraf deal idea.  Cheney’s office refused to own it, describing Bhutto as “complicated and unpredictable.”
• Bhutto’s aides proposed her return to Pakistan to the State Department in spring of 2006.
• In the summer of 2006, Washington threatened to “constrain” or freeze (perhaps partially?) Benazir Bhutto’s assets.  Yet a year later, it showed no interest Bhutto’s request to do so to Musharraf’s cronies, including Ejaz Shah.
• The State Department bought onto the idea of a Bhutto-Musharraf deal in the spring of 2007, with the rise of lawyers’ movement.
• The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had been spying on Benazir Bhutto for months prior to her return. It listened to her phone conversation with son Bilawal in which “she told him about the secret bank accounts that hold the family’s fortunes.”
• The NSA “has harvested a number of portentous conversations of Benazir Bhutto’s.”  This would let the Bush administration take a “carrots and sticks” approach to Benazir.  I would add this data likely serves as a restraint upon Asif Zardari.
• Prior to Bhutto’s return to Pakistan, Asif Zardari believed that she could be best secured by surrounding her with bodies; her American advisers thought otherwise–but Bhutto turned down a $400,000/month proposal from Blackwater.
• Musharraf called Benazir after the first assassination attempt on her.  After offering his sympathies, he tells her, “I’m not the enemy, Bibi.”
• After the Karachi blasts, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson asked Bhutto to “tone down” her criticism of Musharraf.
• Bhutto found out through sources days in advance that Musharraf would be imposing emergency rule/martial law.
• Bhutto was “evolving” during “the last months of her life.”  This was not only due to Karachi assassination attempt and house arrests,  but also because she saw herself as not simply returning to the throne, but also playing a “wider historic role.”

Suskind presents a nuanced version of Benazir — her strengths and weaknesses.  But, interestingly, he concludes somewhat hagiographically.  Benazir, he seems to suggest, evolved into a messianic figure of sorts after she returned to Pakistan.  Flawed, humane, and a source of hope she was.  Her “evolution,” he writes, could have helped her “turn into the next great narrative of this period, capturing the imagination far and wide and turning it away from destructive certainty.”

He then cautions the reader with a reminder of Benazir’s past.  But still, Benazir at her death, for Suskind, internalized the hopes of her nation.  Meanwhile, Zardari (at least the Zardari he met on the Hill in September ’07) is disinterested, misplaced, and uninspiring.

Bhutto, during her return to Pakistan, alternated between populism and a Musharraf-accomodating pragmatism.  She was murdered at a moment in which she was tilted toward the former.  Whether she would subsequently re-tilt toward the latter or stay with the Pakistani public had she survived is unclear.  But myths can be an effective instrument of change.  The potential positive narrative that Suskind writes died with Bhutto remains alive in Pakistan.  Irrespective of its accuracy, it can serve as a means to manipulate elite activity, channeling it toward greater nobility.