The assassination of Benazir Bhutto has threatened to send Pakistan into a spiral towards civil war. The manner of her killing - two bullets followed by a suicide bombing - is not unlike what one could expect from al Qaeda, however there are enough suspects to please any conspiracy theorist.
After all, this is not the first time an attempt has been made on her life, and the last time she made clear who she thought was responsible.
After the first assassination attempt in October, Bhutto spoke plainly about who she believed wanted her dead. "I know exactly who wants to kill me. They are dignitaries of General Zia's former regime who are behind extremism and fanaticism," she told the French magazine Paris-Match. Later she blamed "closet supporters" of the militants and spoke of her fear that retired military men wanted her dead. She pointed an accusing finger at the army's powerful intelligence arm, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
The military, and General Zia ul-Haq in particular, have long been her family's nemesis. Zia unseated her father in a coup in 1977 and hanged him two years later; for years there has been a bitter rivalry between Bhutto and the Pakistani military. While she was in exile, Pervez Musharraf, the general-turned-president, accused her of corruption and mismanagement. She in turn accused Musharraf of squeezing out democracy and last month described him as "contaminated". Yet she stopped short of accusing him directly of involvement in the assassination attempts against her.
Bhutto said that days before the October bombing she had sent Musharraf a letter warning of several different bomb plots against her, including names and telephone numbers of suspects. "I'm not accusing the government. I'm accusing certain people who abuse their powers," she said after that first attack. There certainly may be some within Pakistan's military or among retired officers who regarded Bhutto as a primary threat to their power and the stability of Pakistan, but without hard evidence of their involvement it will be difficult to make mere suspicions stick.
Indeed, it is reported that U.S. intelligence agencies yesterday were drawing up their own list of possible suspects in the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto -- a list that includes al-Qaeda
as well as elements of Pakistan's own intelligence service.
At the top of the list, the officials said, is the al-Qaeda terrorist network and its legion of allies, including loosely affiliated groups that espouse similar views and, in some cases, share training facilities and other resources. But several officials said it is equally plausible that the assassination was carried out with the support -- or at least the tacit approval -- of Pakistani government employees. Most of the officials expressed doubt, however, that President Pervez Musharraf himself would have approved the killing.
Despite the wide range of suspects President Bush wasted no time before going on to national television to let us all know
who he thought was responsible.Speaking to reporters while vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., Mr. Bush attributed Ms. Bhutto’s death to “murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan’s democracy.”
Bush has based his entire Pakistan policy on backing Musharraf, a man who has already
imposed martial law, arrested more than a thousand political opponents and lawyers and put the head of Pakistan's supreme court under house arrest, so the man the US president backs is hardly a great advertisement for Pakistan's democracy.
Nevertheless, Bush is putting the blame for Bhutto's death firmly at the door of al Qaeda because this fits in with his worldview. People who support democracy - and, for the purposes of backing "his" man, he puts Musharraf into this camp - are innately good and incapable of carrying out such an act.
The truth is that neither you, me nor President Bush have any way of knowing who exactly carried out this atrocity. But, having based US policy totally around supporting Musharraf, Bush now has no option other than to continue that course as the US's policies for Pakistan unravel.
What is clear is that many people in Pakistan are
not willing to accept the narrative that Bush and others are seeking to impose on her assassination:
Her supporters turned violent when she was taken to a hospital in Rawalpindi, chanting slogans like “Killer Musharraf.
Indeed, before her death,
Bhutto made clear who she would hold responsible should she be assassinated:
Two months before her death, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto sent an e-mail to her U.S. adviser and longtime friend, saying that if she were killed, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf would bear some of the blame. She cited his government's denial of her request for additional security measures after the October suicide bombing that targeted her upon returning to Pakistan from exile.
"Nothing will, God willing happen," she wrote to Mark Siegel, her U.S. spokesman, lobbyist and friend.
"Just wanted u to know if it does in addition to the names in my letter to Musharaf of Oct 16nth, I wld hold Musharaf responsible. I have been made to feel insecure by his minions and there is no way what is happening in terms of stopping me from taking private cars or using tinted windows or giving jammers or four police mobiles to cover all sides cld happen without him."
There will now be a rush to put all blame on to al Qaeda and to exonerate Musharraf and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.
However, every indication says that many people in Pakistan are not buying into that narrative.
Nawaz Sharif has already brushed off Bush's insistence that the elections must go ahead as planned and has stated that his party
will boycott the elections of they go ahead in protest over Bhutto's death.
“The PML-N announced to boycott the January 8 elections against the brutal killing of Benazir Bhutto,” Nawaz Sharif said while addressing a press conference at the residence of party leader Raja Ashfaq Sarwar late at night. He also said that Pervez Musharraf was the root-cause of all problems being faced by the country as fair and free elections were not possible [while] he is in power. He also demanded that Pervez Musharraf should immediately quit as the federation of Pakistan was facing threats in his presence.
Bush's disastrous policy of backing Musharraf at all costs appears to be in tatters. What now for US policy towards Pakistan? What now for Musharraf?
The truth is that many of Pakistan's population do not back the policies that Musharraf and Bhutto were pushing, imposed as they are from Washington. How long can Washington insist that Pakistan's leaders follow a path of Western interest?
Is there a plan B?
Click title for full article.
UPDATE:The nutters on the right have wasted no time in identifying the true culprits here.
It's the people of Pakistan themselves:
A recent CNN poll showed that 46 percent of Pakistanis approve of Osama bin Laden.
Aspirants to the American presidency should hope to score so highly in the United States. In Pakistan, though, the al-Qaeda emir easily beat out that country’s current president, Pervez Musharraf, who polled at 38 percent.
President George Bush, the face of a campaign to bring democracy — or, at least, some form of sharia-lite that might pass for democracy — to the Islamic world, registered nine percent. Nine!
If you want to know what to make of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s murder today in Pakistan, ponder that.
There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the “rule of law” as a cudgel to bring down a military junta. In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.
Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.
I would have thought a more relevant question might be why so many people in Pakistan support bin Laden. What is it that drives them towards such an extremist? If we are losing the battle of ideas, isn't it incumbent upon us to ask why? After all, we are constantly being told that this is a battle for our very existence. But, no... McCarthy insists that:
Whether we get round to admitting it or not, in Pakistan, our quarrel is with the people. Their struggle, literally, is jihad.
He then concludes that the people of Pakistan are simply not ready for democracy. The truth is that Bhutto would very likely have won at least a plurality in parliament, which surely undermines his argument that Pakistan is not ready for democracy.
In truth, as Bhutto constantly stated, it is the military dictatorship which breeds extremism, and it is that dictatorship which needs to be addressed.
However, as McCarthy makes clear, the worry is that the people of Pakistan - like the people of Palestine - might make the "wrong choice" if allowed a true democratic vote.
Popular elections have not reformed Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon.
His solution?
If you really want democracy and the rule of law in places like Pakistan, you need to kill the jihadists first.
At moments like this, the mindset of people like McCarthy and those of the jihadists really do become impossible to differentiate.
Mervyn Patterson and Michael Semple, the two UN diplomats dismissed from Afghanistan for making contact with the Taliban, were sent home after the US made complaints about them to the Afghan government.
