The Terrorist Prince

The Life and Death of Murtaza Bhutto

Raja Anwar

Verso, 1997, 241 pgs.

           Murtaza Bhutto self-exiled to Afghanistan after his populist demagogue father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was deposed as Prime Minister of Pakistan by his brute underling General Zia al-Haq, then executed in ‘79.  Acting with the impetuous rage of a spoiled child denied, Murtaza began a sanguine scatter-bomb campaign against all those he felt had done him and his family wrong. In Kabul he formed a loose band of terrorist cells he named Al-Zulfikar–“The Sword,” in Urdu. The group was of a sort mercifully rare in the annals of organized terrorism: it fought for no political, social, or economic platforms, but instead desired only to inflict pain. Murtaza killed and maimed not so much out of blind rage; what infected him can more accurately be called a nonchalance with regards to the suffering of others.

          Raja Anwar, the chronicler of Murtaza and Co.’s degraded exploits in The Terrorist Prince: The Life and Death of Murtaza Bhutto, was a student activist with the Bhutto Sr.-founded Pakistan People’s Party in the late ‘60s. It was a time when real hope for something better was spreading across Pakistan in a way it never had before. Anwar threw in his lot with the Sindi patrician, feeling that Bhutto was Pakistan’s best chance for social and political transformation, and became the Prime Minister’s adviser on student and workers’ affairs. When the Elder was murdered Anwar went with the son, in hopes of soon returning to Pakistan in better days. Instead, he was swept down a jagged path of violence and exile. (He now lives in Germany.)

          Al-Zulfikar was run with an amateurism of magnificent proportions. As Anwar paints him Murtaza was both “uninhibited by his ignorance of any kind of warfare” and similarly “seldom inhibited by logic.” One example of a misadventure al-Zulfikar deemed a success was the March 2, 1981 hijacking of a Pakistan International Airlines flight from Karachi. The executor was a street thug named Tipu who was devoted to the Bhutto family in a quite unstable way. His two assistants–one of whom had himself been kidnapped earlier in the day so that he would participate in the affair–hardly knew how to use guns. When the plane landed in Kabul, Murtaza’s specially imported Alsatian hound Wolf signed the dispatches to foreign press offices. The passengers were tenderized to revolutionary sentiments by the incessantly blared recordings of Murtaza’s younger brother Shahnawaz drumming on a table and singing insurrectionary lyrics to Indian film tunes. With foresight an elusive commodity, the cell thought up demands after the hijacking, as they did with the name of the group itself (Murtaza had recently read a pamphlet of the same title).

          Murtaza’s footsoldiers–of whom there were never more than several hundred–were “ill-educated, unemployed lower-middle-class youths, full of enthusiasm, and burning to grab the ultimate prize without having to go through the painful process of a revolution,” according to Anwar. When things started not to go right for Murtaza–shallow plots foiled by incompetence, members arrested and executed by Zia, and so on–he flipped toward brutal paranoia and cumulatively ordered the death of twenty-seven of these unfortunate would-be guerrillas, including Anwar. A fair amount of these executions seem to have been carried out. Anwar was barely saved by international attention and intervention, though he did do several years in Afghanistan’s notorious Pul-i-Charkhi prison, wondering if each day would be his last.

          Anwar points out that if the group hadn’t been so amazingly inept they could have quite likely made a real–if still somewhat pointless–impact. A January ‘82 heat-seeking missile fired by an al-Zulfikar “commando” came within several yards of Zia’s plane: if the wielder of the weapon had received any more training with the missile launcher than Murtaza’s digest of the instruction manual (which Murtaza himself had only flipped through) there would have been a direct hit.

          On the flip side, Al-Zulfikar’s attempted actions were so poorly thought out, Anwar is convinced, that had they succeeded the opposite of their goal would have been achieved. For example, if Tipu had succeeded in an attempt on Zia’s life he made at a shrine in India, Zia would’ve been martyred, the PPP crushed, and another iron-fisted general would’ve taken his place. 

          Anwar’s account is based both on his first-hand experience and later interviews with other participants, many of whom are now dead. It’s a fascinating and intimately-detailed portrait of the Middle East and Indian Subcontinent in the hot years of Cold War II (when Reagan’s gang started up conflicts again after Kissinger’s détente). This was the time when the Soviet Union was waging its Vietnam in Afghanistan and Reagan’s crew–newly in power and trembling with aggression–was backing all sorts of sadistic creatures to check the spread of the Evil Empire (soon, when Soviet hopes for victory soured, the U.S. simply desired to prolong their humiliation as long as possible). It was a time, Anwar writes, “when both sides backed champions they could not publicly acknowledge”–leaving an opening for Murtaza to be inflated in international eyes simply because it was so hard to know what was really going on.

          But The Terrorist Prince isn’t just a study of a superpower battlefield: it intricately uncovers the power games and intrigues of the dictatorial pantheon heading the thuggish states involved. Indra Ghandi appears, using Murtaza when convenient; Syria’s Hafiz al-Asad aids Murtaza as a personal favor to the Bhutto family. Afghanistan’s head of security, Dr. Najibullah (soon to become the last communist President of Afghanistan, later brutally executed by the Taliban in 1996), was a co-conspirator of Murtaza’s who soon had to part ways with the young liability lest he displease his Soviet overseers; Momar Ghaddafi–“uncle” Ghaddafi to Murtaza–hovers at the edge of much of the tale, nearly dipping into the fray but somehow steering clear. Unlike most accounts written by Westerners, in The Terrorist Prince the intricacies of the land have an inherent relevance. The superpowers exert force and manipulated the players, but they can not control the miasma they were instrumental in creating.

          Though there’s editorializing on every page about the tragedies of Pakistan, Anwar doesn’t offer any tidily packaged moral to drawn redemption or even seeds of hope from the contorted classical drama of the Bhutto family. Murtaza himself “in the end... represented nothing much beyond the right of himself and his family to have their way.” At different times he points to Pakistan’s feudalism, Cold War power plays, and the “institutionalized ruthlessness of the state” as identifiable culprits. But the main understanding to be walked away with is that these same forces continue to send out tremors that manage to be more destructive with each wave.