Benazir Bhutto assassinated

[Akash]

Published on Thursday, January 3, 2008 by Common Wonders
Pseudo-Reporting
by Robert C. Koehler

Many U.S. media outlets were quick to give us a primer on Islamic terrorism in the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination last week, even though actual evidence points the finger far more at our ally in the war on terror, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, than it does at the Taliban or al-Qaida.

Indeed, McClatchy Newspapers recently reported that Bhutto, at the time of her murder, was in possession of evidence that Pakistan’s military intelligence agency was planning to rig the upcoming election (then scheduled for Jan. 8 ) in Musharraf’s favor, supplying, as if it were needed, an obvious motive for getting rid of her.

While there was some good, or at least restrained, reporting by U.S. media as the tragedy unfolded, the main sources of news for most Americans maintain what I can only call a cocked trigger of jingoism, which often goes off before the screams subside and the blood and debris are hosed into the gutter.

“Weird, isn’t it, how swiftly the narrative is laid down for us,” Robert Fisk observed in the U.K’s Independent. Yeah, I’d say so. I’d add: insulting, infuriating, dangerous - this media readiness to act as the propaganda arm of the party in power, to simplify evil as the sole domain of the enemy du jour, to “unite” the country in self-righteousness and hatred of that enemy.

Without such shamelessly bad reporting - perhaps a better term is “pseudo-reporting” - we couldn’t have gone to war with Iraq in 2003 or, for that matter, Spain in 1898. Pseudo-reporting has, alas, a long tradition. It appeals to a docile, uninformed populace and demands the scrutiny of citizens capable of complex thought. Outing such reporting when it fizzles - when too much counter-evidence keeps it from gaining momentum and creating policy - is particularly useful. It’s easier to sharpen our awareness of the forms of deception when the deception is not actively doing harm.

To that end, here’s a quick survey, by no means complete, of some of the forms of pseudo-reporting that were on display the first day or two after Bhutto’s assassination:

A. The quasi-factual assertion in the lead paragraph or headline, aimed at the casual news consumer who plunges only toenail deep into the story, e.g.: “Suspicion swirled around Islamic extremists Thursday as news spread that former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated.” (CNN)

B. The affectation of objectivity, usually achieved by quoting alleged “experts” or anonymous officials, as though they were disinterested in how the news was spun. Such quotes also must be high up in the story so they can establish a context that ensures that blame still adheres to the designated enemy when, later in the story, in further affectation of objectivity, an enemy spokesman is quoted denying any responsibility. “Just 24 hours after the assassination . . . Pakistan’s interior ministry announced what many people had suspected: al-Qaida-linked extremists were responsible for the killing.” (Time Magazine)

C. The subtle dismissal of counter-belief. In the TV studio, this can be accomplished with a timely roll of the anchorperson’s eyeballs. In print, verbal artifice is necessary to imply rashness or emotionality, in blatant contrast to the disinterested expertise cited at the top of the story. “Regardless of who is behind the attack, many Pakistanis will suspect that Musharraf or his security forces played a role in Bhutto’s death . . .” (CNN)

D. Oversimplification and selective reportage, combined with excruciatingly unacknowledged psychological projection. Time, for instance, saw in the enemy’s dearth of previous political assassinations not a reason to look elsewhere for a culprit but “a dramatic and disturbing diversification in al-Qaida’s terrorism playbook . . . (on top of a past record of) creating chaos and panic through large terror strikes that claim large numbers of random victims.”

The analysis certainly makes it clear that these are bad, bad people, and seemingly argues that this fact alone implicates them in the latest outrage. I remind the newsmagazine that no one’s innocent in the war on terror, and quote from a 1996 Defense Department publication called “Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance,” by Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade:

“The intent here is to impose a regime of Shock and Awe through delivery of instant, nearly incomprehensible levels of massive destruction directed at influencing society writ large, meaning its leadership and public, rather than targeting directly against military or strategic objectives. . . . The employment of this capability against society and its values, called ‘counter-value’ . . . is massively destructive strikes directly at the public will of the adversary to resist.”

Remember? We did this to Iraq. But so what? We’re good, we mean well, we’d never have allies who kill their opponents. It’s all there in black and white.

Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/03/6133/

[Akash]

For the millionth time, I love Amy Goodman.

Published on Wednesday, January 2, 2008 by TruthDig.com
Musharraf Still Stands
by Amy Goodman

Benazir Bhutto and her supporters who died with her during the suicide attack Dec. 27 are the latest victims of decades of dangerous U.S. support for Pakistan’s military regime. The country’s dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has held his grip on power despite increasing popular unrest. The Bush administration got nervous, turning to Bhutto to preserve the status quo in Pakistan. There is no doubt the exiled former prime minister was personally brave to return to her country. But Pakistani professor Pervez Hoodbhoy was critical nevertheless: “After returning to Pakistan, she made clear that for a few table scraps, she would have happily teamed up with Musharraf under the hopelessly absurd U.S. plan to give the military government a civilian face.”

While President Bush imposed “regime change” on Iraq, based on fictitious weapons of mass destruction, “regime preservation” is the U.S. policy for Pakistan, despite its role in global nuclear proliferation, the sale of true WMDs.

Adrian Levy is a senior staff correspondent for the British newspaper The Guardian and co-author of “Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons.” He describes a “military government repressing human rights, connected tentatively to 9/11, state-sponsored terrorism with radical connections to al-Qaida that was proliferating WMD and of course that was not Iraq, it was Pakistan.” He told me: “The problem facing the Bush administration was their policy post-9/11 was very much to embrace Pakistan as an essential ally in the war on terror in order to allow the narrative over Iraq and the WMD in Iraq to rise. The Pakistanis milked their nuclear program for hard cash, selling to Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, the Axis of Evil powers. We also know there is intelligence to show that they began negotiations very much with Saudi Arabia, Syria and, of course, there are tentative contacts with al-Qaida elements as well.”

The New York Times revealed last week that at least $5 billion in U.S. aid delivered to Pakistan since 9/11 to fight al-Qaida and the Taliban actually went into weapons systems against another U.S. ally, India.

The more nuclear weapons Pakistan has, the more the U.S. has a vested interest in protecting them. As The Washington Post reported last week, even before the Bhutto assassination U.S. Special Forces were planning a vastly increased presence in Pakistan in 2008, “to train and support indigenous counterinsurgency forces and clandestine counterterrorism units.” The Glasgow Herald now reports that U.S. Special Forces “snatch squads” are in Pakistan, prepared to secure the nuclear warheads in the event of the government’s collapse. What Pakistani author Tariq Ali told me recently about Afghanistan equally applies to Pakistan: “The people of Afghanistan ... do not like being occupied by foreign powers. They didn’t like being occupied by the Russians, and they don’t like being occupied by the United States and the NATO armies in their country. And as long as this foreign occupation lasts, there will be forms of resistance against it.”

The CIA coined the term blowback. It applies to situations like Afghanistan in the 1970s and ’80s when the U.S. armed and trained the mujahedeen, including Osama bin Laden, to counter the Soviet occupation. When the Soviets were finally forced out, the mujahedeen set their sights on a new target: the U.S. That’s blowback.

While the Bush administration pushes for quick elections in Pakistan, it is important to raise these issues in our elections here at home. The assassination of Bhutto put foreign policy back on the front burner in the U.S. presidential race—though you would think that 2007 being the deadliest year yet in Iraq for U.S. soldiers (at least 900 dead) would have accomplished that. The candidates could use this as a “teachable moment” to talk about the wrongheaded long-term U.S. support—Republican and Democrat—for Pakistan’s corrupt, human-rights-abusing nuclear regime. Did any of the leading Democratic contenders use the moment to demonstrate that they represent a true opposition party? While they each tout themselves as true “change” agents, they have yet to prove it. We are waiting.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 650 stations in North America.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080101_musharraf_still_stands/

[Big Magilla]

I finally heard from Reza. This is what he had to say:

Thank you for your concern. Yes, this whole episode was extremely shocking and totally uncalled for. We just stayed in as the Government gave a 3 day holiday as mourning and every place was closed. Thank God Islamabad saw little trouble on the streets but other cities saw the major brunt of the people's wrath. We had gas shortages and in the neighboring city of Rawalpindi there was a lot of trouble with looting, shooting and burning.

We live in crazy times and the sad part is that there will not be any conclusive resolution to all of this......there never is! This has been a terrible year for Pakistan. Hope the new year brings a positive change.

Please thank all on the Board for showing concern. Hopefully soon I shall come on board as soon as my internet connection is setup.

Thanks, cheers and A Happy New Year to all and their families!


Reza

[Akash]

Counterpunch
Weekend Edition
December 29 / 30, 2007
Letter from Lahore
Encountering Benazir Bhutto

By FAWZIA AFZAL-KHAN

Lahore, Pakistan

I was a twenty-two year old graduate student in Boston when in 1980, a year after her father, the charismatic populist former prime minister of Pakistan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had been hung by military dictator Zia ul Haque, Ms Bhutto arrived at Radcliffe, her former alma mater, to deliver a speech on Women and Islam as part of the annual Kenneth Galbraith Lecture Series. Like so many other Pakistani students who were studying at area institutions at the time, I arrived starry-eyed to hear her deliver her speech and to see up-close and personal a woman who, in her year in self-imposed exile from Pakistan since her father's execution, had been slowly building a case for herself as the legitimate future ruler of Pakistan, a force for democracy in our benighted nation.

I recall being disappointed by her lectureone in which she claimed that Islam and women's rights were not only not incompatible, but that as a woman who had risen to political heights of leadership herself, she could say that Islam proved no barrier for women as national and international leaders-a stance which at the time, given the backlash against women so visible in Khomeini's recently post-Islamic revolution Iran, seemed highly dubious in the contemporary manifestations of Islamism in the world. Her personal charisma, however-enhanced by her somewhat disheveled or at least highly unfashionable appearance-shalwar worn high above the ankles, no make-up, none of the sophisticated sartorial gestures so much on display in the carefully coifed appearance of women of her elite class, added to the allure of a woman bent upon presenting herself to her largely academic audience of expatriate Pakistani students as the one to whom, above all others, we owed our allegiance as the rightful political heir to her father's brand of populist socialism, the next truly democratic leader of a post-dictatorship Pakistan. And an intellectual to boot.

So the latter gesture rang hollow. But since most of us were more interested in her leadership credentials, we hung around after the formal lecture was over, to ask her questions in the more intimate, less formal structure of a post-lecture setting with its requisite wine and cheese, the "Islamic" title of the talk notwithstanding! I remember vividly the sycophants of her inner circle surrounding her as she sat at a table, gushing all over her, acting as a protective shield against possibly hostile outsiders. I also remember almost as if it were yesterday, the astonishment I felt at her own hostile response to what I thought then, and still do today, my fair and rather innocuous question: what was her election platform or manifesto by which one could gauge the sincerity and depth of her commitment to a truly democratic agenda? Oh boy. Wrong question. I thought she was about to have an epileptic seizure by the way her eyes glazed over, then started to turn bloodshot, and the foam began forming at the corners of her bright red lips (the only concession to "feminine fashion" she had made). She virtually spat out her answer, anger and arrogance on display in every word she uttered. "Do you know who I am?" incredulity at my naivete hissing through her words. "Cassettes of my speeches sell like hotcakes in every market in Pakistan," and when my expression must have betrayed some level of incomprehension, she lashed out," that means the people of Pakistan love me, they know how I have suffered for them when I was jailed following my father's execution, just because as his daughter and the one groomed to be a future leader of Pakistan, the army just could not take the chance of my being free to assume that mantle." Her final comment to me-which led to a young man standing next to me pulling me away and advising me to leave before things got really ugly-was something to the effect that she would "see me outside." Was that a veiled threat, in the manner of a feudal lord to a servant who has spoken out of line, or an invitation to speak to her "outside" after the evening was over?

Today, the day after her assassination by a suicide bomber, as I sat in my mother's home in Lahore, stunned like all other Pakistanis at the enormity of what had just happened in the country of my birth, I had reason to recall that one and only face-to-face meeting I had had with her before the first time she became an elected Prime Minister-the first ever and youngest female Muslim Head of State. I felt then-and do today, 25 years later-that Benazir was a product of her environment, a daughter to a feudal scion-but, and this was a position I had matured into over the intervening years-she was, despite that background, and inspite of all of the corruption charges against her and her husband, all probably true, though never proved in a court of law to this day-a personally brave woman, and the only one in our times of raging religious extremism and general political apathy of much of the chattering classes in the face of the entrenched military hegemony of the Musharraf regime in Pakistan over the past decade--to take a public political stance against both these dreadfully regressive aspects of the Pakistani state and society today. She also-like her father before her, and in line with the PPP manifesto-pointed unerringly to the class divide as the fundamental problem besetting Pakistani society, without addressing which, the politics of religious extremism will continue to hold sway over much of the disenfranchised electorate.

"The extremists need a dictatorship, and dictatorship needs extremists," she stated to Sky News TV shortly after Musharraf declared Emergency Rule in Pakistan on Nov 3rd, a few weeks after her own arrival in Pakistan to contest military rule and participate in promised elections after having been in political exile for many years in London and Dubai, following the ouster of her government by Nawaz Sharif first in 1990 and then again 1996 both on the basis of massive corruption charges against her and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari. Even though her party, the Pakistan People's Party, secured the highest number of votes and secured 80 percent of the seats in the National Assembly in the 2002 Oct general elections, military strongman Pervez Musharraf's government amended Pakistan's constitution to ban prime ministers from serving more than two terms in office effectively banning Bhutto-and Nawaz Sharif-from ever holding that office again (The News, Dec 28th, Section iv: Benazir Special). Under pressure from the US following the downward spiral in his popularity in the face of a deepening economic and political malaise in Pakistan since early this year-sparked off by the judicial crisis manhandled by Musharraf and the out-of-control behavior of Islamist extremist groups creating havoc in the country through the increase in suicide bombings and the state-within-a-state created by the Red Mosque militants with ties to Al Qaeda which also spiraled out of control and led to a showdown that cost hundreds of lives during a sensational showdown between the militants and the army on July 2007-America once again intervened in the political situation of Pakistan and insisted that Musharraf lift the Emergency rule he had imposed on the country on Nov 3rd and hold free and fair elections allowing Benazir and Nawaz Sharif to return from political exile to participate as leaders of their respective political parties, thus paving the way for a return to democratic rule.

Many Pakistanis felt then-and still do-that Benazir's return was engineered by the US as a counter to what the US government now feared could backfire badly in their face-their over-reliance and overt backing of a military regime growing increasingly unpopular among the citizenry and leading to political unrest in this highly strategic and volatile part of the world. They had backed Musharraf's illegitimate regime because he had portrayed himself as the face of an "Enlightened Moderation" philosophy-an Islam that could prove a counterweight to the extremism of the Taliban/Al Qaeda type running rampant in the tribal areas of NWFP and Baluchistan (and also ofcourse because he was their ally in the "war against Terror"). What became really frightening to the West, however-and to most Pakistanis as well over this past year-was that the extremist groups and their violent tactics of female beheadings, burning of CD and Video shops, suicide bombings, and so on had begun, in the past year, to encroach upon those areas of Pakistan which had previously seemed impregnable to this sort of madness, including the major modern urban cities like Karachi and more recently Islamabad, the capital.

Enter Benazir, the still charismatic face of the PPP, even with her maligned feudalistic behavior toward those in her party leadership she had much to fear from due to their increasing popularity among the rank and file, such as Aitzaz Ehsan, who recently distanced himself from the party and its policy of granting "lifetime chairmanship" to Benazir-understood by many in her own party like Aitzaz and by many politically active civil society and student groups to be an obstacle to genuine democracy in Pakistan. Yet-and this is the point I wish to underscore most strongly in this essay-one that I have been arguing vehemently for all day today in countless heated conversations with family and friends and other concerned citizens of the Pakistani polity-Benazir did what no one else in the Pakistani leadership has had the guts to do. She openly condemned Islamist extremism-and despite her earlier backing of the Taliban regime in 1996-now took an unequivocal stand against the Taliban and condemned terrorist acts committed by the Taliban and their supporters. She repeatedly stated both prior to and after her return to Pakistan in October that she and her party, if elected, would take a bold stance against these terrorist groups operating with seeming impunity most recently in the Swat area of Pakistan and encroaching upon the citizens' civil and human rights to live their lives in peace and without threat of coercion to their own brand of a regressive Islamic code focused most particularly on curtailing the rights of women to education and freedom of movement and dress, as well as the civil liberties of religious minorities including Shiite Muslims and Christians.

This anti-Islamist stance cost her her life, as a suicide bomber finally succeeded in his mission to destroy what his ilk perceived as a woman preaching the secularist hedonism of the West, in cahoots with a Zionist and capitalist Imperialist plot to destroy the Muslim world-the dar-ul-Islam. Quoting Alfred Stepan and Aqil Shah, in "Pakistan's Real Bulwark," (Washington Post, 5 May 2004, A29), the well-known Islamic scholar Vali Nasr claims, "Finally, it is Muslim Democracy-and not the creaky and brittle authoritarianisms by which the Muslim world is so beset-that offers the whole world its best hope for an effective bulwark against radical and violent Islamism." 1 While Nasr may be correct in blasting the "brittle authoritarianisms" under which so much of the Muslim world continues to suffer-particularly Pakistan which has rarely been free of such authoritarian, undemocratic rule in its 60-year history as a nation-state-he is quite misguided, I think, in his belief that what he is calling " Muslim Democracy" is going to provide a solution to the problems that beset the Muslim world today-if not the world in general. Nasr's contention that "Muslim Democracy offers the Muslim world the promise of moderation. As Islamists find themselves facing-or caught up in-the Muslim Democratic dynamic, they will find themselves increasingly facing the hard choice of changing or suffering marginalization," has proved exactly the opposite as far as Pakistan is concerned. In trying to prove that the Pakistan Muslim League Party headed by Nawaz Sharif in the 1990s made a virtue of pragmatism in dealing with the threat of Islamist parties and their extremist agendas, by following and promoting a "moderate Islamic" agenda that would not alienate the Muslim vote bank (as opposed to a non-Muslim one-in a Muslim country???)-Nasr states that, "Between 1993 and 1999, the PML continued to push a mixture of business-friendly economic policies and nationalist-cum-Islamic appeals. Infrastructure development and globalization went hand-in-hand with a nuclear-weapons program, confrontations with India, and rhetorical support for Islamic legislation. Balancing the demands of the various constituencies at which these postures were severally aimed was the PML's challenge. Business interests supported peace with India, for instance, while nationalists and Islamists wanted a tougher stance.

As the 1990s wore on, such tensions began to undermine the PML's appeal to its Muslim-minded voter base and gave the military angles to play against the party in advance of the 1999 coup." Here, Nasr seems to be saying that ultimately, the PML could not, in fact, balance its various constituencies and hence did not succeed in keeping its "Muslim-minded" voter base happy, despite its "rhetorical support for Islamic legislation." Yet, in the very next paragraph of his essay, Nasr wants to make a case for the PML's success in mobilizing what he calls, "a rough and ready version of Muslim democracy"-which worried the generals enough to make them engineer a coup against Sharif's elected government. He writes, "there followed Musharraf's 1999 coup against Sharif and the systematic dismantling, under military tutelage, of the PML.

When Musharraf allowed controlled elections to be held in 2002, Islamists did spectacularly well, rebounding all the way up to a best-ever 20 percent vote share. While Musharraf, especially since 9/11, has postured as Pakistan's sole bulwark against radical Islamist rule, a more accurate statement of the facts would say that the military did full-bore Islamism a huge favor by yanking the PML from power and stopping the country's uncertain yet real progress toward Muslim Democracy."

These are bizarre claims indeed, and miss the obvious fact that neither Nawaz Sharif's pandering, rhetorical or otherwise, "pragmatic" or not, to the Islamists, nor the military's so-called philosophy of "Enlightened Moderation" which was remarkably similar to Sharif's policy of pragmatic accomodationism to the "Muslim-minded voter bank," have succeeded in reducing the threat of extremism in Pakistan. During her double-stint as Prime Minister of Pakistan, even Benazir and the PPP could not push through their election promises of repealing the Zina Ordinance promulgated against women's fundamental human rights by the late Islamist dictator Zia ul Haque, due to immense pressure from the Opposition which was dominated by the presence of the Islamists and their political allies. And so, to claim that something called "Muslim Democracy" is the way forward out of the mess created by these extremist Islamist groups in Muslim countries is nothing short of assuming an ostrich-like posture in the face of the clear and present danger of fanaticism, no matter what its economic and political root causes may be. Yes, we must address the fundamental issue of economic disparity between the haves and have-nots which has spread like a cancer in the body politic of Pakistan over its 60 year history, and which surely has ots roots in the new imperialism of globalization-from-above--but we cannot, must not, acquiesce to Islamism, moderate or otherwise, as any sort of cure or even explanation for the "anger of the masses" which exhibits itself through these reprehensible violent acts.

Thus, despite whatever one may have thought of Benazir and her politically marred leadership stints in the short history of Pakistan-she did stand up toward the end of her life in clear , unequivocal defiance of the politics of pragmatism so admiringly espoused by Vali Nasr and other Muslim moderates wishing to rescue something out of the quagmire of radical political Islam. Hers is a choice I admire-without endorsing her shortcomings as a leader--and it is a choice all thinking Muslims should pay close attention to: one that articulates a resounding "NO" to the encroachment of religion in the business of state and governance. Despite the clear threat to her life by Islamist groups and those who would use them to secure their own political interests and power, Benazir told Time magazine last month, "I am ready to die for my country."

Let us hope her death is not in vain.

Dr. Fawzia Afzal-Khan is Professor of English at Montclair State University, New Jersey. She is currently on sabbatical in Pakistan, lecturing at Forman Christian College, working on a research project on a cultural gendered history of Pakistan via the iconic figure of the late great female singer Madame Noor Jehan, singing revolutionary songs and protesting against the Musharraf regime alongside student and civil society groups demanding a restoration of the judiciary and of the pre-Nov 3rd constitution. She can be reached at fak0912@yahoo.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/fawzia12292007.html



Edited By Akash on 1199081963

[Akash]

Aw, thanks Steph. I feel bad about the whore comment in the other thread now.

[Steph2]

But you DO tend to be a little overwrought sometimes, you know. (a little?) (sometimes?) :p

He does. But it's kind of hot...

[Sonic Youth]

This just in:

The Pakistani government is now claiming Bhutto died after being maulled by a Siberian tiger that escaped from the zoo.

[Sonic Youth]

And WWI's biggest concern was just mustard gas.

But it may end up not being that extreme. Let's not panic. Deep breaths. A new year's coming. Let's banish these notions from our minds. Think positively. Think happy thoughts...



Edited By Sonic Youth on 1198940844

[OscarGuy]

Sonic, that's the exact thought that popped through my head. This could be the Archduke Ferdinand of the 21st Century...It would be interesting if WWIII started in a different part of the world than the first two...

[Sonic Youth]

An Archduke Ferdinand moment?

In any event, don't breathe easy just because Iran is off the table.


U.S. fears spillover into Afghanistan
Bhutto assassination may mark start of extremist offensive, officials worry
By Thomas E. Ricks and Robin Wright
The Washington Post
updated 10:14 p.m. ET, Fri., Dec. 28, 2007


President Bush held an emergency meeting of his top foreign policy aides yesterday to discuss the deepening crisis in Pakistan, as administration officials and others explored whether Thursday's assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto marks the beginning of a new Islamic extremist offensive that could spread beyond Pakistan and undermine the U.S. war effort in neighboring Afghanistan.

U.S. officials fear that a renewed campaign by Islamic militants aimed at the Pakistani government, and based along the border with Afghanistan, would complicate U.S. policy in the region by effectively merging the six-year-old war in Afghanistan with Pakistan's growing turbulence.

"The fates of Afghanistan and Pakistan are inextricably tied," said J. Alexander Thier, a former United Nations official in Afghanistan who is now at the U.S. Institute for Peace.

U.S. military officers and other defense experts do not anticipate an immediate impact on U.S. operations in Afghanistan. But they are concerned that continued instability eventually will spill over and intensify the fighting in Afghanistan, which has spiked in recent months as the Taliban has strengthened and expanded its operations.

Unrest in Pakistan and increasing fuel prices have already boosted the cost of food in Afghanistan, making it more likely that hungry Afghans will be lured by payments from the Taliban to participate in attacks, a U.S. Army officer in Afghanistan said.

In a secure videoconference yesterday linking officials in Washington, Islamabad and Crawford, Tex., Bush received briefings from CIA Director Michael V. Hayden and U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne W. Patterson, said National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe. Bush then discussed Bhutto's assassination and U.S. efforts to stabilize Pakistan with his top foreign policy advisers, including Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, as well as Adm. William J. Fallon of Central Command and Marine Gen. James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

U.S. intelligence and Defense Department sources said there is increasing evidence that the assassination of Bhutto, a former Pakistani prime minister, was carried out by al-Qaeda or its allies inside Pakistan. The intelligence officials said that in recent weeks their colleagues had passed along warnings to the Pakistani government that al-Qaeda-related groups were planning suicide attacks on Pakistani politicians.

The U.S. and Pakistani governments are focusing on Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Taliban Movement of Pakistan, as a possible suspect. A senior U.S. official said that the Bush administration is paying attention to a list provided by Pakistan's interior ministry indicating that Mehsud's targets include former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, former interior minister Aftab Khan Sherpao, and several other cabinet officials and moderate Islamist leaders. "I wouldn't exactly call it a hit list, but we take it very seriously," the official said. "All moderates [in Pakistan] are now under threat from this terrorism."

Mehsud told the BBC earlier this month that the Pakistani government's actions forced him to react with a "defensive jihad."

After signing a condolence book for Bhutto at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, Rice said the United States is in contact with "all" of the parties in Pakistan and stressed that the Jan. 8 elections should not be postponed. "Obviously, it's just very important that the democratic process go forward," she told reporters.

The U.S. Embassy in Pakistan warned U.S. citizens Thursday to keep a low profile and avoid public gatherings. A Pentagon official said plans to evacuate Americans from the country are being reviewed.

"We've really got a new situation here in western Pakistan," said Army Col. Thomas F. Lynch III, who has served in Afghanistan and with Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for Pakistan and the Middle East. He said the assassination marks a "critical new phase" in jihadist operations in Pakistan and predicted that the coming months would bring concentrated attacks on other prominent Pakistanis.

"The Taliban . . . are indeed a growing element of the domestic political stew" in Pakistan, said John Blackton, who served as a U.S. official in Afghanistan in the 1970s and again 20 years later. He noted that Pakistani military intelligence created the Taliban in Afghanistan.

How the United States responds will hinge largely on the actions of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, in whom U.S. officials have mixed confidence. If there is indeed a new challenge by Islamic militants emerging in Pakistan, then the United States will have to do whatever it can to support Musharraf, the U.S. Army officer in Afghanistan said.

‘Pakistan must take drastic action'

"Pakistan must take drastic action against the Taliban in its midst or we will face the prospect of a nuclear weapon falling into the hands of al-Qaeda — a threat far more dangerous and real than Hussein's arsenal ever was," he said, referring to the deposed Saddam Hussein.

But Musharraf has a track record of promising much to Washington but doing little to counter the militants, others said. "My prediction is, Musharraf will go into a bunker mentality and be nicer to the Muslims," said John McCreary, who led the Defense Intelligence Agency's 2001 task force on Afghanistan. "He goes through the pretenses of crackdown but never follows through."

"Pakistan isn't really engaged in a fight against terror," added Blackton. "One of the mistakes amongst many U.S. policymakers is to project the American construct of a war on terror onto the Pakistani regime struggle for survival. There are some congruencies between the two, but even more differences."


The clever move for Musharraf would be to allay such doubts by capturing or killing a major Islamic extremist leader in the coming weeks, said Larry P. Goodson, an area expert who teaches strategy at the U.S. Army War College. But he said he doubts that would happen or that Musharraf would take many concrete actions, aside possibly from declaring a new state of emergency.

A countervailing pressure on Musharraf is that if he does not respond effectively to an Islamic militant campaign against his government, he also could face falling from power. At some point, said Teresita C. Schaffer, a former State Department official specializing in India and Pakistan, the Pakistani army "could conclude that he's a liability."

[Akash]

Two wonderful articles from The Nation

Pakistan Without Benazir
by MONI MOHSIN

[posted online on December 28, 2007]

When news of Benazir's assassination broke, my nephew gasped, "She can't be dead! She's always been a part of my life. Always." So strong and ubiquitous was her presence over the last twenty years that he cannot imagine a Pakistan without her. No one can. She grew up in the public eye, and we all knew her through her various incarnations from pimply adolescent to the first female leader of a Muslim nation. Dressed in her signature Seven-Up green shalwar kameez, her head covered by a white chiffon scarf, this arresting, contradictory woman, with an impossibly tragi-glamorous family history, had the wherewithal to save her country but repeatedly disappointed. She was consistent only in her bravery. I, along with others, had expected so much from her the day that she was swept to power in 1988, washing away a decade of General Zia's military oppression. We all hoped this third opportunity would see her redeeming her past failings; the religious extremists put paid to that.

There is a strong element of predestination to her life and death. Her father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, was a charismatic and ruthlessly ambitious demagogue who created the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), the only political party with a national footprint. A complex personality, he was ultimately most true to his roots as a feudal land owner. He espoused socialist principles, but his politics were about the cult of his personality. He said he was a man of the people, but his lieutenants were hand-picked from among privileged classes. He claimed to be a nationalist, yet his personal ambition paved the way for the dismemberment of the nation in 1971 and for an orgy of vindictive and economically ruinous nationalizations. The eldest of four, "Pinky" was the apple of her father's eye and, unusually in a traditional society, his anointed successor; dynastic ambition trumped any pretense at democratic process.

Probably more than we realize, she was a creature of her father, mirroring many of his own paradoxes but without his petty vindictiveness. Like him, her Western liberal persona was cultivated and nurtured at Western academic institutions, first Harvard then Oxford (where she was president of the Union). These experiences honed her sharp mind and inculcated easy familiarity with Western liberal tradition. Additionally, she became well versed in objective analysis, debate and persuasion. However, a strong sense of entitlement and an autocratic nature were also part of the patrimony. This duality wrestled for her soul and largely explains her blemished political history.

Constantly stressing her relationship to her martyred father, Benazir made leadership of the People's Party contingent on bloodline rather than political ability. Squabbling with her mother, she appointed herself sole Chairperson for life of an allegedly democratic institution. Like her father, she crushed aspirants to prominence within her party, and old stalwarts were ruthlessly sidelined. The creation of party structure came second to self projection. Her death leaves a leadership vacuum. Moreover, she could not distinguish between what was hers and what belonged to Pakistan, treating state assets and revenues as hers to dispense as favors to courtiers. She was dismissed twice on charges of personal corruption with her husband, widely dubbed "Mr. Ten Per Cent"; yet she refused to countenance any allegations of wrong doing.

Despite her failings, she will be sorely missed at a time when Pakistan needs unifying, far-sighted national leaders. She was a woman of great courage and political shrewdness, with a firm grasp of geopolitical realities and global economic imperatives. Alone among the entire democratic leadership of Pakistan, she understood the grave threat the country faced from religious extremists. And in an atmosphere of extreme hostility and suspicion towards America, she was brave enough to articulate that it was not just America's war on terror but ours as well. She knew the risks and had already survived one bloody attack on her life. But in continuing to campaign openly, she refused to be cowed by extremists. Despite repeated warnings from military intelligence and her own oft-stated fears of assassination by Islamists, she was determined to confront this genie. In this final confrontation, there was a neat coincidence between her feudal patrimony ("It is my land") and her democratic values. Flawed, she still represented the best secular option for breaching Pakistan's multiple provincial, linguistic, ethnic, and social fissures. We will miss her.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080107/moshin

Benazir Bhutto: An Age of Hope Is Over
by BARBARA CROSSETTE

[posted online on December 27, 2007]

Nineteen years ago at the end of December, Benazir Bhutto, fresh from her first, exhilarating election victory and newly sworn in as Prime Minister of Pakistan, met Rajiv Gandhi, the youthful prime minister of India, for talks in Islamabad. She was 35, he was 44. There was obvious good will, almost intimacy, between them. The air was full of promise and hope that these two modernizing scions of dominant political families would turn decades of war and hostility between their nations into a new era of peace.

Three and a half years later, Gandhi was assassinated. There had been no breakthrough with Pakistan to bolster his legacy. Now Bhutto is dead, at another moment of renewed anticipation. An age of hope is over.

There is a terrible symmetry in the lives and deaths of these two political leaders. Both were the children of powerful people: Indira Gandhi as India's prime minister and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto her counterpart in Pakistan. Together, in 1972, they had negotiated an agreement over Kashmir, but their heirs were never able to build on it. Their respective children, Rajiv and Benazir, had seen those parents suffer politically motivated deaths: Indira murdered in 1984 by bodyguards revenging her attacks on Sikhs, and Zulfikar hanged under the regime of General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq in what many Pakistanis consider a thinly disguised judicial execution.

Young Gandhi and Bhutto, both killed in suicide attacks, ultimately became the victims of inherited policies. Rajiv Gandhi had tried to put an end to Indian meddling in Sri Lanka and its support for a vicious Tamil Tiger rebellion. He was killed by a Sri Lankan Tamil suicide bomber, a woman who moved toward him to touch his feet in an age-old gesture, then triggered an explosion that blew them both apart. While it is too early to know who killed Benazir, Pakistan's policies on Afghanistan are the backdrop to this tense and dangerous moment. Her father and his successors had supported Afghan rebels in order to become a player in Afghanistan and counter Indian influence in Kabul lately aligning riskily with American policies. Rajiv's mother, whose intelligence agencies roamed the region causing havoc, had set out to weaken Sri Lanka, South Asia's most developed nation.

Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi were both campaigning to return to power when they died. Both had been elected, then vilified. She lost support among middle-class Pakistanis for her feudal ways and unwillingness to take on social issues--child labor or the mistreatment of women--or chip away at the power of the military, and was driven from office twice on charges of corruption, much of it attributed to her husband. In India, Rajiv was the perennial butt of attacks from unreconstructed leftists and traditionalists who scoffed at his Westernized style, Italian wife and fresh ideas that rattled the khadi crowd. On the night he died, a policeman told me they had identified his remains by his expensive imported running shoes. Suspicions linger that Gandhi or those close to him may have been involved in illegal payments for arms contracts.

Tragically, political violence has been the bane of modern South Asia, from Afghanistan and Pakistan east to Bangladesh. Militants and fanatics of all stripes and dogmas and grievances have assassinated leaders since much of the region gained independence from Britain in the mid 1940s. It has been a formidable hindrance to development of political institutions.

In New Delhi, Mohandas K. Gandhi was killed in 1948 by an outraged Hindu. Pakistan's first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated in 1951--in the same Rawalpindi park where Benazir Bhutto was attacked--and General Zia ul-Haq perished in a still mysterious plane crash in 1988. In Sri Lanka in 1959, Prime Minister S.W.R.D Bandaranaike fell victim to a fanatic Buddhist monk, the first of two generations of more than a half-dozen leading politicians to die in shootings and bombings. (Tamil Tiger rebels would later try but fail to kill Bandaranaike's daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga, when she was president.) Sheikh Mujibir Rahman, founder and first Prime Minister of independent Bangladesh, was murdered in 1975; in 1981 Bangladeshi President Ziaur Rahman, was shot in an army coup. Nepal's entire royal family was wiped out in one evening in Kathmandu in 2001, apparently by a disaffected crown prince.

Hindus and Muslims killed one another by the hundreds of thousands after the partition of British India in 1947 into Pakistan and modern India. And compared with Pakistan since then, India has experienced much more large-scale sectarian and political violence, with thousands of Sikhs butchered in the streets of Delhi and elsewhere in North India after Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984, and up to 2,000 Muslims slaughtered by Hindu nationalists in Gujarat--Mahatma Gandhi's birthplace--in 2002. In both cases, political parties have been deeply implicated yet no political leader has been punished--in a democracy.

As the world mourns the loss of Benazir Bhutto, it would be myopic to focus only on Islamic-inspired violence and on Pakistan. This is a region with a turbulent post-independence political history. Our (Islamophobic?) preoccupation with Muslim terrorism in Pakistan and Afghanistan often blocks out a bigger picture. From end to end, South Asia is a region drenched in blood.
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20080107&s=crossette2



Edited By Akash on 1198906526

[Akash]

I apologize if anyone thinks it's too early for this, but this article sums it up perfectly for me. Essentially, she was no savior but her death still means more turmoil for her country.

Counterpunch
December 28, 2007
Bhutto and Her Legacy
Death in Rawalpindi

By BINOY KAMPMARK

he assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi yesterday is yet another statement of politics as tragedy. The killers left nothing to chance, using gunshots and the now commonplace suicide bombing. She is dead, along with a score of others, figures killed in the tragic unfolding of politics in Pakistan. Mortality is high among aspirants for the leading office in Pakistan.

This is a country at war with itself. The military gazes over the country's frail atrophied institutions, a menacing presence that always threatens intervention. Bhutto's father, no less, was ordered to hang by the coup instigator General Mohamed Zia Ul-Haq after being jailed in 1977. Fundamentalism, as ever, gnaws at the heels of the state. If the military don't get you, the mullah must. Democracy is the perpetual casualty, a poor, undernourished creature. Bhutto's death simply deprives it further, but it won't by too much. To see her as a martyr of promise within a brutal political process would be to misunderstand her legacy.

Political memories are, after all, short. It enables flawed, even failed characters to re-run their platforms and repackage their rhetoric, especially when they lead a life of exile. Exile cools the memories, douses the flames. Bhutto Mark III (after two stints in office) was meant to make mileage out of this. The new brand label was meant to be the figure of unity, the saviour. This product, sold at the helm of the Pakistan People's Party was starting to gain some steam, though it had a few other products in the political marketplace: another 'democrat' in the form of Pervez Musharraf (crudely named 'Busharraf' by opponents), and Nawaz Sharif. With such candidates as these, democracy was being eased into a period of long house-arrest.

While it was never entirely proven in court, Bhutto's personal wealth amassed while she was leader on two occasions did little for confidence in civic institutions. In fact, it systematically ruined them. Pakistan may have elected the first woman leader of an Islamic state, but it also elected an avaricious figure versed in the dark arts of feudalist plunder.

Bhutto's husband Asif Zardari, a polo-obsessed individual with a voracious appetite for kickbacks and commissions, tended to have his hand out most of the time. When it wasn't filled with a polo stick, it was usually counting cash. The French corporation Dassault Aviation paid him a handsome fee of $US 200 million for a four billion dollar jetfighter deal that never took place ­ his wife was duly ousted in 1995 before the plans could be implemented. What is also abysmal was that the entire development program of Pakistan, if you could call it that, never took off. It was once said that not a single road was built during Bhutto's administrations. Pakistan was not so much capitalist but capital-less.

And no wonder: the schemes of plunder hatched within the Bhutto plan were nothing short of grand. One, facilitated by Dubai-based bullion trader Abdul Razzak Yaqub, was intended to corner the gold market for the Bhutto family. The New York Times (Jan 9, 1998) aptly called this family estate the House of Graft, where the trade would essentially be controlled by a network of corporations owned by Bhutto family members. Again, her husband played a starring role. With such exploits, the very fanaticism Bhutto claimed to be fighting was fanned.

While the gesture could never be taken sincerely, Nawaz Sharif's corruption charges against the Bhuttos ('meaningless games' scoffed Zardari) had more than a ring of truth to them. While the pop magazines saw Bhutto as regal, a high-society woman with stints at Oxford and Harvard, Interpol also found her appealing, warming an arrest notice for her.

We are not left with any evidence that Bhutto Mark III might have been better from the first or second prototypes. She was never given the chance, and death might have come sooner, had the first assassination attempt succeeded in October.

Had she survived, there would probably have been, as there was in Argentina in the 1970s or France in 1814, a 'restoration'. All such restorations, like the Bourbon one that replaced Napoleon, suggest the failure of ideas, the need for poor reactionary re-runs in the name of stability. A people so disgusted and fearful would have seen her, Evita (or Louis XVIII)-like, ride into office, the familiar evil, with its crippling certainties. Some might have felt that a corrupt democrat is better than a trigger happy despot in charge of a nuclear state. That may well be the case. Geopolitical strategists are left pondering.

The terror has not abated, and with her death, there is a bigger chance that stability (forget democracy) will cease altogether. We are left mourning the circumstances of her demise as we have mourned the periodic cruelty in that country. If not execution, then assassination; if neither, than it is war on the frontiers with fraternal India. The immediate future promises to be catastrophic, though Musharaf or Nawaz Sharif may yet produce a miracle. And a miracle it will have to be.
http://www.counterpunch.org/kampmark12282007.html

[Damien]

Come on, admit it. It was goldderby wasn't it?

Nah, nobody there had ever heard of Benazir Bhutto.

Bhutto? Wasn't that Popeye's nemesis?

[Akash]

Two things. First, on another Oscar board, someone asked if this might improve the Oscar chances of The Kite Runner and A Mighty Heart.

Ok, I take it back. Sometimes there should be tactfulness.

Come on, admit it. It was goldderby wasn't it?

[Akash]

But you DO tend to be a little overwrought sometimes, you know. (a little?) (sometimes?) :p

Moi??