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To Pindi Station

By Niranjan Ramakrishnan

06 January, 2008
Countercurrents.org

Nearly every report of Benazir Bhutto's terrible demise began by noting her historic distinction of being the first female head of government in an Islamic country. Mentioned far below, if at all, was a far more notable legacy -- that it was her administration that orginated the Taliban.

Granting that the cacophony of You Tube, permanent audio, IM's and suchlike mediations is apt to dull the sensibilities a mite, few noted the utter irony of Benazir's life: The first female prime minister of the entire Islamic Universe -- chic personified with degrees from Oxford and Harvard to boot -- kicking off a madrasah-muscle-muzzle culture which would result in every woman in Afghanistan being confined to her home as a rule, forced to don the head-to-toe burqa when outside the home, such outings too permissible only under strict rules of chaperone!
So much for Ms. Bhutto's Western impact. On Pakistan's Eastern front a similar effort attended Benazir's first stint as PM. Pakistani surrogates in Kashmir kidnapped the Indian Home Minister's daughter for ransom, demanding the release of their colleagues from Indian jails. The Indian government's subsequent capitulation is widely regarded as the beginning of the current turmoil in Kashmir, a tragedy which has resulted in thousands of deaths, ethnic cleansing of Hindus in the Kashmir Valley, the unleashing of an iron-fist by the Indian government and a human rights nightmare all around.

Along the way, the jehadis in Kashmir have frequently coerced women to follow 7th century Islamic codes. They have even threatened women newsreaders with disfigurement if they did not eschew makeup and don the veil. It is worth mentioning that Ms. Bhutto, meanwhile, was hardly inattentive to her own appearance, winning tabloid acclaim as one of the most beautiful women in the world.

It is thus hard to resist a "those who live by the sword..." sigh, but in truth such cynicism is not entirely confined to Pakistan: India, nurturing early visions of big-power status, trained and sustained the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka (in a similar twist of irony, the chelas would end up killing the erstwhile patron, Rajiv Gandhi). The results of America's sponsorship of the Afghan mujahideen (a force raised by Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski and later hailed by Ronald Reagan as the moral equivalent of America's founding fathers) are too raw to require retelling, especially in the wake of the recent movie, Charlie Wilson's War. For that matter, one may go all the way back to 1917, when the Germans sought to undermine the Tsar by promoting a famous Russian subversive, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, a contrivance we can be sure they had ample time to reflect upon all those decades when East Germany was under the Russian thumb.
Ninety years after Lenin's journey via the sealed train, the US, seized with panic following
the popularity of the lawyers' revolt against Musharraf, pushed through a hasty deal between the general and the lady (Ek Musharraf Ek Hasina, to cannibalize an old Hindi film title), whereby Musharraf would hold elections, Bhutto would win, and together they would turn back Fundamentalist resurgence in Pakistan and live happily ever after.

This fairy tale 21st century renactment of Edmund Wilson's To Finland Station was slated to end eight years of exile for Benazir with all outstanding criminal cases against her withdrawn. If Lenin's sealed train was about a beleaguered big power of the day trying to extricate itself, Benazir's flight back to Pakistan in 2007 was viewed by many as a farce orchestrated by another big power, equally beleaguered. That farce would inevitably turn to tragedy was not only not unexpected, it was forseen by several Pakistan observers, including US diplomat Peter Galbraith, Benazir's close friend and college-mate. In 1917, Lenin soon made good on his deal with the Germans (with Trotsky playing negotiator at Brest-Litovsk). The unfortunate Benazir died before she could do anything for her benefactors.

The two events are emblematic of the transformation of geopolitics in the past 90 years: It is hard to imagine that any Western Democracy of the Victorian Age would, for instance, have thought of arming Communists or Anarchists to destabilize a state. It was an era when the State was a sacrosanct notion, even if states themselves warred constantly. Yet this is exactly what America and others have done in recent years. Looked at another way, the Afghan mujahideen and the Taliban were early forays into privatizing war, a wheel we shall see turning full circle in the years to come as Blackwater and other private armies impinge on life in American back at home.

But the larger lesson, that of fostering private armies, even if initially for use against other states, sooner or later results in some terrible blowback on the patron, has remained unlearned. One of the most haunting passages in the Mahabharata relates to the persistent idiocy of mankind -- which Yudhishtira says is the most wondrous thing in the world: We see death every day around us, but presume that we ourselves are somehow exempt from it. Pakistan probably disavows the Mahabharata, as it is wont to do all things pre-Islamic. But some eternal verities, to recall Einstein's quip about astrology, work whether or not you believe in them.
R.I.P.

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