Afghanistan
Does Not Exist:
Viva Pakistan!
By
Gaither Stewart
31 December,
2007
Countercurrents.org
(Rome)
I must be paranoid for I believe that Washington stands behind the assassination
of Benazir Bhutto. Since the truth is as hard to come by in Pakistan
as it is in Washington, D.C. most observers can only hazard guesses
as to what really happened there in recent days and weeks. So I too
will take the liberty of expounding my version of events.
Though today
even how she died is disputed, in my opinion Washington sponsored Benazir
Bhutto’s assassination. Another of Washington’s mad plans
gone wrong! Like so many others in that region. I mean, a courageous
woman, secular, in a limited sense democratic, sent back home, probably
with another bag full of dollars, to clean up the image of General Musharraf’s
faltering military regime in Pakistan. And hopefully to make things
right in the US military protectorate and ally in the East.
But make
things right how? With her life?
Now whoa
there! That is stretching matters.
Abroad, Benazir
was known as a democrat. Didn’t her children play with Clinton’s
daughter? After all! On the other hand everybody in Pakistan knew she
was an ally of Washington. True, she was of an illustrious family, corrupt
but illustrious—anything or anyone, it is easy to think, is better
than the military that has ruled over Pakistan forever.
Still, it
is misleading to describe her as a martyr. Benazir Bhutto was certainly
no saint. Still, a woman Prime Minister looks good. I can imagine some
man, yes, it has to be a man, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his tie awry,
his jacket hanging on the back of his chair at a conference table in
some grotto across the Potomac. The others gathered around the table
like the image of a woman at the head of a puppet regime in Pakistan
this upper echelon bureaucrat depicts. Yes, just the thing we need,
a woman to head these unruly Asians, Pashtuns, fundamentalists, terrorists
all. And after all she is a pro-American woman. She will be malleable
and controllable.
But, the
idea man says—now grimly, saving the best part to last, as if
it were the natural outcome—of course she will never be elected.
She has to be sacrificed. Heads nod, lips tighten, pencils draw circles
and bizarre figures.
Yet anyone
in his right mind with only vague knowledge of Asia can grasp that a
political alliance between Benazir Bhutto and the ex-general President
Musharraf couldn’t exist in heaven or on earth. Nor does the establishment
of democracy in Pakistan has anything to do with it. As if a woman,
secular, mundane, not widely loved in Pakistan outside her own Pakistan
Peoples Party, could successfully head this Moslem country of 165 million
people in which power today is divided among the military, Taliban fundamentalists
and Al Qaida terrorists.
Benazir Bhutto’s
elite class not only supported the Taliban for years. With US help her
class in fact created the Taliban in order to extend Pakistani control
over Afghanistan and its rebellious tribes, and also organize them to
fight the Soviet Communist invaders from the north, and perhaps also
to somehow get their hands on the poppy plantations.
Instead,
in the end, the Talibans talibanized parts of Pakistan so that today
the northwest borders between the two countries have tended to vanish,
creating a huge, Taliban Pashtun-infested no-man’s land. Italian
reporters there say you can’t tell them apart. Now both Afghan
Talibans and Pakistani Talibans are fighting against US and NATO forces
in the same losing war others have fought earlier in history. It is
the very same war that everyone has always lost—one crisis, one
conflict, one holy war.
For it is
the same fundamentalism that both Musharraf and Washington have used
and continue to use unabashedly when they agree with one faction or
another. Any number of factions would have killed Mrs. Bhutto.
So this assassination,
like that of Martin Luther King or of John Kennedy and legions of others
down the trail of international intrigue, has much wider ramifications
than a secular woman aspiring to political power.
A woman in
the trenches against the entire force of the nation! Besides, Musharraf
had told her he would never allow her to return home from her exile
in London and Dubai. What changed his mind?
The old question
holds here: Who stands to benefit most from her death? In an air of
her martyrdom and in the atmosphere of chaos reigning in Pakistan, the
result of her removal is that the United States, backed by martial law
imposed by a US-supported military regime, can concentrate on a military
build up in Pakistan as a substitute for defeat in Iraq and impending
debacle in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan
is an illusion. It is only virtual. Afghanistan doesn’t exist.
England learned that the hard way. Soviet Russia experienced it. Once
a favorite goal of the jet-set of former times, Kabul, like the country,
is no more. An Italian journalist friend depicts Kabul today as a place
of dust, mud and bivouacs, heavy Chinese bicycles, rickety taxis, sirens
and fires and bombs. In other words, another Baghdad.
Pakistan
is thus the soft under belly of an illusion. Pakistan is to become the
site for future US concentration ... and more illusions.
RETURN
Nonetheless,
Bhutto’s return was important for Bush and his ridiculous “exportation
of democracy” slogans. Nonetheless, sane observers can only guess
at possible strategic purposes. Yet, the project itself was stupid.
Everybody
knew, including Benazir Bhutto herself, that the variegated forces of
the country wanted to kill her. Don’t forget that Benazir’s
father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, an autocratic opportunist who called himself
Socialist who headed one of the few non-military governments of Pakistan
in the 1970s, was overthrown and hanged by another general-dictator,
Zia ul-Haq. There is a tradition here, a script to be followed.
That must
have been the goal.
The country
was already in chaos, civil war a constant threat. The obvious next
step for Washington was application of the good old “strategy
of tension”. For now, after the assassination, the road is paved
for a ferocious unrelenting crushing of all opposition inside the identifiable
borders of the country and the salvation of a tottering regime and collapsing
US policies in the whole region.
The assassination
of Benazir Bhutto is a disaster, the Pearl Harbor permitting American
military build-up in Pakistan. Though Al Qaida denies the attentat,
it or one of many fundamentalist groups could have been the willing
arm—the version Musharraf proposes—but surely Washington
organized the return home of Benazir Bhutto, back home to die.
In that sense
she was a victim, a sacrificial victim of the US urge for world supremacy.
Benazir Bhutto was a calculating politician. One wonders how she could
be so naïve as to believe in “bringing democracy” to
a chiefly military-fundamentalist nation, with a thin façade
of democracy, and a puppet of the USA.
In the end,
it seems, her pro-American, Anglo-Saxon nature and her natural courage
got the best of her. No rational calculation could have suggested return
to Pakistan. I suspect only promises of glory by those gray men in Washington,
a guarantee of total US support and perhaps bags of money could have
swayed her.
Again and
again, it is the same old story of the USA taking the wrong side, in
this case, of being on any side at all. Which goes to prove that the
battle for justice and democracy has absolutely nothing to do with it;
perhaps not even control over those nuclear weapons held by the Pakistani
military regime is the issue. The issue is again the gas and oil pipelines
from former Soviet Central Asia running through Afghanistan and Pakistan
to the sea … and those poppy fields, too.
Again: Who
benefited from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto? Like Musharraf,
Fox News naturally goes for Al Qaida. So that is obviously the line
of part of the US establishment. At this point Musharraf had little
to gain from her death. The true truth is that before her assassination
the United States had already set in motion a plan to strengthen its
position in Pakistan since the Iraq war is already lost and the Afghanistan
adventure a failure.
Chaos never
hurts the truly powerful. Bhutto’s murder and the subsequent upheaval
are the pretext for an iron fist to cover the arrival and concentration
of US forces there, a deployment reportedly scheduled for early 2008.
Thus America is stepping into this huge and complex nation in the first
person.
Therefore,
I go for the secret services of the United States of America, erring
again. In a few years we will doubtless be writing and reading about
an exit strategy from Pakistan.
This is not
the first such mistake.
Yet, puppets
like Benazir Bhutto and Pevrez Musharraf, courageous or malicious, continue
to come and go.
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights
Comment
Policy
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.