Bhutto
Assassination Heightens
Threat Of US Intervention In Pakistan
By
Bill Van Auken
29 December,
2007
WSWS.org
With
Pakistan erupting in violence over the assassination of its former prime
minister Benazir Bhutto and amid conflicting accounts as to both the
identity of her assassins and even the cause of her death, official
Washington and the American mass media have coalesced around a version
of events that has been crafted to suit US strategic interests.
Without any
substantive evidence, the crime has been attributed to Al Qaeda, while
Bhutto herself has been proclaimed a martyr both in the struggle for
democracy in her own country and in the US “global war on terror.”
Meanwhile, the government of President Pervez Musharraf has been exonerated.
There is ample reason to question this “official story”
on all counts.
The obvious
intent is to turn this undeniably tragic event into a new justification
for the pursuit of US strategic interests in the region. In the week
leading up to the assassination, there have been a number of reports
indicating that US military forces are already operating inside Pakistan
and preparing to substantially escalate these operations.
At this point,
there is no proof as to the authorship of the assassination. The military-controlled
government of President Musharraf claims to have intercepted a phone
call in which an “Al Qaeda leader” congratulated his supporters
for the killing. Yet web sites that have claimed responsibility for
previous Al Qaeda terrorist acts have not done so in relation to the
Bhutto killing.
Then there
is the question as to how Bhutto died. In the wake of numerous eyewitness
accounts that she had been shot before a bomb blast ripped through the
crowd at an election campaign rally in Rawalpindi, the Pakistani Interior
Ministry issued three conflicting accounts: the first saying that she
died from a bullet wound to the neck, the second that she was killed
by shrapnel from the bomb and a third claiming that she had fractured
her skull against a door handle while ducking down into the sunroof
of her vehicle to dodge either the bullets or the explosion. How the
government reached this last novel conclusion is unclear, as no autopsy
was conducted on Bhutto’s body.
A spokesperson
for Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party, Farooq Naik, called
the Musharraf government’s shifting story “a pack of lies”
and insisted that the real cause of death was sniper fire. If indeed
the Pakistani politician was shot to death by a sniper in Rawalpindi,
the historic garrison town which is headquarters to the country’s
military, suspicion would shift even more sharply towards the government
or elements within its powerful military-intelligence apparatus.
This is already
the predominant popular sentiment within Pakistan itself. As Philadelphia
Inquirer’s columnist Trudy Rubin reported from the country, “Just
about every Pakistani with whom I spoke blamed her death not on Al Qaeda,
but on their own government—and the United States.”
And, there
is irrefutable evidence that Bhutto herself saw the government, rather
than Al Qaeda, as the main threat to her life.
The New York
Times Friday cited one Western official who met with the Pakistani politician
the day before she was killed. He said, according to the Times, that
Bhutto “complained that while the militants represented a threat,
the government was as much a threat in its failure to ensure security.
She suggested that either the government had a deal with the militants
that allowed them to carry on their terrorist activities, or that President
Musharraf’s approach at dealing with the problem of militancy
was utterly ineffective.”
And in Washington,
Bhutto’s American lobbyist, Mark Siegel, released an email from
Bhutto that she had asked him to make public if she were assassinated.
The message was sent shortly after the attempt on her life last October—a
massive bombing that claimed the lives of nearly 140 people during a
procession in Karachi following her return to the country. She had publicly
accused the Pakistani military-intelligence apparatus of having a direct
hand in this attack.
In her email,
she said that she would “hold Musharraf responsible” if
she were killed in Pakistan.“I have been made to feel insecure
by his minions,” she wrote of the Pakistani military strongman.
Detailing
the refusal of government officials to provide her with elementary security,
Bhutto wrote, “There is no way that what is happening in terms
of stopping me from taking private cars or using tinted windows or giving
jammers [to detonate roadside bombs] or four police mobiles to cover
all sides could happen without him.”
In an interview
on CNN, Siegel commented: “As we prepared for the campaign ...
Bhutto was very concerned she was not getting the security that she
had asked for. She basically asked for all that was required for someone
of the standing of a former prime minister. All of that was denied her.”
Asked by
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer whether Bhutto had herself not been reckless,
Siegel responded, “Don’t blame the victim for the crime.
Musharraf is responsible.”
Meanwhile,
Senator Joseph Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, held a press
conference in Iowa in which he revealed that he had personally interceded
with Musharraf to ask for specific security procedures to protect Bhutto,
but his requests were ignored.
“The
failure to protect Mrs. Bhutto raises a lot of hard questions for the
government and security services that have to be answered,” Biden
said. When asked if he believed the Pakistani government had deliberately
placed Bhutto in harm’s way, he backed off, however, claiming
he did not know what security was in place when Bhutto was killed.
The military-Islamist connection
The lines
separating Al Qaeda—or, to be more precise, radical Islamist elements
in Pakistan—from the country’s military-intelligence apparatus
are hardly firm. Pakistan’s military-controlled regimes have encouraged
and rested upon support from Islamist forces—as a counterweight
to the working class and the left—ever since General Zia-ul Haq
seized power and carried out the hanging of Benzir Bhutto’s father,
then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in 1979. The military regime—and
in particular its intelligence arm, the ISI—further cemented these
ties during the US-backed war against the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan
in the 1980s. It was then that the ISI and the CIA worked to build up
the movement that became know as Al Qaeda and collaborated directly
with Osama bin Laden.
That these
ties still exist is without question. US military commanders have repeatedly
complained that their Pakistani counterparts have warned Al Qaeda elements
of impending US operations. That the Musharraf government or elements
within the military could utilize Islamist elements to carry out such
an assassination—or facilitate their committing such a crime—is
obvious.
As for a
motive, Musharraf and his main base of support, the military command,
have a clear one. They had no interest in sharing state power—and
access to both graft and billions of dollars in US aid—with the
Pakistan People’s Party. Benazir Bhutto was twice elected prime
minister in the 1990s—and twice removed. Each of these changes
in power involved bitter conflicts between her government and hostile
elements in the top brass of the Pakistani military and the ISI.
Now Musharraf’s
principal rival for political power is dead and her party in disarray.
He remains the principal figure upon whom Washington depends in Pakistan,
a reality reflected in the insistence by the Bush administration, the
media and the leading Democratic presidential candidates that he had
nothing to do with the killing.
While the
violent death of a 54-year-old woman with three children is both tragic
and shocking, the attempt to turn Bhutto into a martyr for democracy
is preposterous.
She was brought
back to Pakistan as part of a sordid scheme hatched by the Bush administration
to give the military-controlled regime headed by Musharraf a pseudo-democratic
facade.
The Washington
Post spelled out the details of this deal in a report Friday.
With mounting
political unrest in Pakistan, Washington was desperate to prop up the
military strongman, whom it viewed as a principal asset in the so-called
war on terror.
“As
President Pervez Musharraf’s political future began to unravel
this year, Bhutto became the only politician who might help keep him
in power,” the Post reported.
It quoted
Bhutto’s lobbyist, Mark Siegel, as stating, “The US came
to understand that Bhutto was not a threat to stability, but was instead
the only possible way that we could guarantee stability and keep the
presidency of Musharraf intact.”
The terms
of the arrangement were that Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s
Party would not oppose Musharraf’s widely unpopular bid for a
third term as president last September and, in return, Musharraf would
grant Bhutto immunity from criminal charges related to the rampant corruption
that characterized her previous terms as prime minister.
US officials,
including Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher, served as the
direct brokers in 18 months of negotiations leading to the deal, flying
back and forth between Islamabad and Bhutto’s homes in Dubai and
London.
Musharraf
was reportedly opposed to any amnesty for Bhutto, not to mention her
return to power. According to the Post report, it was Deputy Secretary
of State John Negroponte—a veteran of dirty deals with dictators—who
finally convinced him. “He basically delivered a message to Musharraf
that we would stand by him, but he needed a democratic facade on the
government, and we thought Benazir was the right choice for that face,”
Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and National Security Council staff
member, told the Post.
In the end,
it was Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who phoned Bhutto
in early October, telling her to return to Pakistan to serve essentially
as an instrument of US policy and a prop for the Musharraf regime. In
doing so, Rice sent Bhutto to her death.
Musharraf
had no real desire to move ahead with Washington’s attempt to
make Bhutto the presentable “face” for his reactionary regime,
which led to, at the very least, the denial of state protection to Bhutto,
if not her outright assassination by elements of the state.
The political reality behind Bhutto’s facade
Had the deal
been consummated, it hardly would have led to a flowering of democracy
in Pakistan. Rather, it would have installed a Washington-controlled
prime minister as the figurehead for a military-dominated regime aligned
with the Bush administration in a country where 70 percent of the population
is hostile to US policy in the region.
And, while
Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party has engaged in populist
and even pseudo-socialist rhetoric, it has always been a representative
of the Pakistan’s landed aristocracy and a firm defender of its
power and privileges. During her two terms in power, the Bhutto family
used their control over the state apparatus to enrich themselves, with
her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, earning the nickname “Mr. ten percent,”
for the kickbacks he extracted for state contracts.
Her governments—like
that of Musharraf—were characterized by harsh repression, disappearances
and state killings, including that of her own brother, Murtaza, who
had split from the PPP.
That Washington
was able to broker a deal between Bhutto and Musharraf is testimony
to the entirely rotten and anti-democratic character of the Pakistani
bourgeoisie as a whole, a ruling elite that is separated by a vast gulf
from the masses of impoverished workers and peasants and which has defended
its wealth and power through savage repression, open alignment with
imperialism and appeals to every form of religious obscurantism and
communalist hatred.
The direct
involvement of Musharraf and the Pakistani military in the Bhutto assassination
will not stop the Bush administration from continuing to collaborate
with him or, if necessary, another military strongman. Washington has
maintained its strategic alliance with Pakistan through the continuous
assassinations and military coups that have characterized the country’s
history.
It has acted
as a direct accomplice in many of these crimes, most notoriously in
the support given by President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State
of State Henry Kissinger to the bloodbath unleashed against Bengali
nationalist movement in 1971, in which US-supplied arms were used to
butcher hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilians, while
millions more were turned into refugees.
The Bush
administration’s aim remains that of rescuing and somehow legitimizing
the Musharraf regime. Bush spent a large part of Friday in a secure
video conference linking his ranch in Crawford, Texas with the US National
Security Council in Washington and the American ambassador in Islamabad
to discuss the Pakistani crisis.
The entire
country has been plunged into violence by the assassination, with banks,
police stations, government offices, railroad terminals and trains burned
and dozens of people killed. Pakistani security forces have been given
“shoot on sight” orders against anyone seen to be engaging
in “anti-state activities.” Transportation services have
been shut down and gas stations closed by government order, leaving
huge numbers of people stranded.
Under these
conditions, the White House and the State Department are publicly calling
for parliamentary elections set for January 8 to be held as planned,
claiming that to postpone them would dishonor Bhutto’s memory.
While even before the assassination, holding these elections with Musharraf
still in power would have stripped them of any credibility, to stage
them after the killing of the principal opposition leader would render
them farcical. The White House sees such an exercise solely as a fig
leaf for its imperialist policy in Pakistan, serving the same function
as similar votes staged in US-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan.
The urgency
attached to this exercise is bound up with Washington’s plans
for expanded military operations in the country. The day before Bhutto’s
assassination, the Washington Post’s national security columnist
William Arkin reported, “Beginning early next year, US Special
Forces are expected to vastly expand their presence in Pakistan, as
part of an effort to train and support indigenous counter-insurgency
forces and clandestine counterterrorism units, according to defense
officials involved with the planning.”
Several days
earlier, NBC’s Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski reported
that US special operation troops are already “engaged in direct
attacks against Al Qaeda inside Pakistan” operating in the tribal
regions in the west of the country. The report made it clear that the
so-called “trainers” sent by the US are directly involved
in combat alongside Pakistani forces.
The report
also quoted US Defense Secretary Robert Gates as stating, “Al
Qaeda right now seems to have turned its face toward Pakistan and attacks
against the Pakistani government.”
Meanwhile
a Pentagon spokesman stressed Friday that Washington is confident that
Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are “under control.” Nonetheless,
there have also been reports that the US military is reviewing contingency
plans for a military intervention in the country on the pretext of safeguarding
its nuclear arsenal.
The mass
popular revulsion over the Bhutto assassination has unleashed intense
instability in Pakistan. A further unraveling of the political situation
could well draw the US military into direct involvement in the attempt
to suppress popular upheavals in a country of 165 million people.
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