Benazir
Bhutto: A Victim Of
American Meddling
By
Ahmed Quraishi
29 December 2007
AhmedQuraishi.com
In 1988, the United States actively
helped Benazir Bhutto’s rise to power in Pakistan. Nineteen years
later, Washington has seriously botched a second attempt. Mrs. Bhutto
is killed in the process.
In 1988,
the American preference was firmly conveyed to Islamabad but remained
confined to diplomatic channels, never made public. This time, however,
the unconcealed and very blatant support by the United States for Mrs.
Bhutto did not go unnoticed and might have marked her for assassination.
Rightly or
wrongly, people inside and outside Pakistan got the impression she was
‘America’s choice’ at a time when anti-Americanism
is at a peak in Pakistan and worldwide. Mrs. Bhutto became the latest
and the highest-profile target for many people on the Afghanistan-Pakistan
border who believe it is payback time for the Pakistani government and,
most importantly, for the United States.
Mrs. Bhutto’s
transformation in Washington – in less than a year and a half
– from a failed politician into a democratic icon, is mind boggling.
It also raises questions as to why Washington was so eager to install
her in Islamabad despite her record and despite the legal ban on third-time
premiership.
For an entire decade, Mrs. Bhutto was ignored by the American media
and political elite. The U.S. media had documented colorful stories
about the ineptitude of Mrs. Bhutto’s two administrations during
the 1990s.
By mid 2006,
there was a sudden change of heart in Washington. It coincided with
a gradual increase in American criticism for Pakistan, a concerted U.S.
media campaign portraying Pakistan as a country ripe for American military
intervention, and unwarranted focus on the Pakistani nuclear and strategic
arsenal. There was open talk about Washington contemplating regime-change
in Islamabad after what appeared to be Pakistani leadership’s
refusal to play ball on China, Iran, and Afghanistan.
The last
one, Afghanistan, has recently become a staging ground for cross-border,
state-sponsored terrorism inside neighboring Pakistan, further fueling
Pakistani suspicions about Washington’s relationship with Islamabad.
This change
of heart in Washington surprised even American political observers.
One of them, Mr. Arthur Herman, who is writing a book on Gandhi and
Churchill, was so stunned at how the U.S. media was creating a new image
for Mrs. Bhutto that he wrote a letter to the editor of the Wall Street
Journal, published on 16 June 2006, reminding the American audience
that, “As prime minister of Pakistan, Ms. Bhutto proved to be
one of the most incompetent leaders in the history of South Asia.”
In October,
Benazir Bhutto landed in Pakistan guns blazing. Her supporters will
argue she returned to Pakistan because of her commitment to democracy.
If this is true, she certainly did a good job of hiding it during her
decade of self-imposed exile. She quite happily spent those years away
from politics, fighting off a plethora of corruption cases in Spanish
and Swiss courts. She returned to Pakistan because her friends in Washington
suddenly found a job for her in Islamabad.
Was there
a threat to her life when she returned to Pakistan on 19 October?
Certainly
there was. There was a threat to Musharraf’s life, too, and to
the lives of a whole list of Pakistani politicians, both in and out
of government. But she returned because U.S. officials assured her they
were forcing Musharraf to bring her to power in Pakistan. The now-infamous
U.S.-brokered ‘deal’ included forcing the Pakistani president
to drop her corruption cases and releasing frozen bank accounts worth
hundreds of millions of dollars.
That’s
the kind of security assurance that probably convinced Mrs. Bhutto to
return to the same country she voluntarily left a decade ago to escape
prosecution.
It is not
difficult to imagine how this naked U.S. sponsorship of Mrs. Bhutto’s
future career in Pakistan was enough to provoke extremists who already
view with suspicion the U.S. role in the region.
Around two
weeks ago, Al Qaeda-linked terrorist, Baitullah Mehsud, hiding somewhere
on the Afghan-Pakistani border, had warned the Pakistani government
that he was declaring a ‘defensive jihad.’ Those who study
religious movements noticed this unusual play with words. In Islam,
only a legitimate ruler, not individuals, can wage Jihad. However, individuals
are allowed in certain cases to wage a ‘defensive jihad’
without formal State sanction if they are under attack. Mehsud was basically
twisting religion to justify his rebellion against the Pakistani federal
government.
It should be mentioned here that a segment of the Pakistani national
security community suspects that Mr. Mehsud’s rebellion is actively
supported from the Afghan soil under the control of Karzai administration.
Mr. Mehsud’s fighters are well trained and well equipped with
all types of mortars, rockets, rocket launchers, machine guns, ammunition,
and communication equipment that cannot be easily available to them
in Pakistan.
In October,
shortly after Mrs. Bhutto’s arrival in Karachi, one of Mehsud’s
aides, Mullah Faqeer, was quoted by several news agencies active in
the Pakistan’s tribal heartland as saying his followers will give
her a “taste” of the terrorist backlash against U.S. and
its allies.
Mrs. Bhutto’s
overt American ties and her very pro-U.S. statements, often at odds
with the stated positions of Islamabad, were clearly used as a tool
to recruit angry potential suicide attackers who would be motivated
enough to assassinate her.
However,
Mrs. Bhutto did little to check the swelling ranks of her potential
enemies.
MORE ENEMIES
Political
rivals aside, the ranks of Mrs. Bhutto’s enemies swelled manifold
just in the past six months or so, thanks to her highly controversial
statements regarding Pakistani interests and the U.S. role in the region.
After her
return, she had demanded that one of Pakistan’s professional intelligence
agencies, the ISI, be ‘restructured’, mirroring arguments
found within parts of the American think-tank circuit. And in a press
conference during her house arrest in Lahore in November she went as
far as asking Pakistan army officers to revolt against the army chief,
a damning attempt at destroying a professional military from within.
She has also said she would consider handing over Dr. A. Q. Khan, a
hero to most Pakistanis, to international investigators, and allow U.S.
forces to operate inside Pakistan.
Shireen Mazari,
a security analyst writing for The News, advised Mrs. Bhutto, in a column
published only a day before the tragic assassination, to be more “sensitive
to Pakistani concerns” instead of playing to a foreign audience,
especially when Mrs. Bhutto’s sizeable support base in the country
should have ended her need for such naked foreign support.
Hours before
her assassination, observers noticed how Mr. Hamid Karzai, the Afghan
president who has been highly critical of Pakistan and who is not trusted
by most Pakistanis, singled out Mrs. Bhutto – and not Mr. Nawaz
Sharif or any other Pakistani politician – for a meeting after
ending his official engagements in Islamabad. This was interpreted by
many as a clear signal from Mr. Karzai to all Pakistanis, and especially
to his rival President Musharraf, that he was endorsing Washington’s
pick for a future chief executive in Pakistan. It would be foolish to
think that this move by Mr. Karzai went unnoticed by Al Qaeda.
When the
New York Times came out with a report on 24 December quoting unnamed
U.S. officials accusing Pakistan of misusing $ 5 billion in reimbursements,
one of Mrs. Bhutto’s spokespersons, Sherry Rehman, came out within
hours to confirm the report.
“The latest reports,” she said, “cast doubt on the
[Pakistani] military regime’s commitment to fight the war on terror.”
It was a sad statement, coming from a possible future chief executive
of the country, reposing undue trust in U.S. allegations, which incidentally,
happened to be ridiculous. This was not U. S. aid but reimbursement
for war expenses incurred by Pakistan and required not U.S. oversight
on how it was spent.
It was classic
political point scoring on the part of Mrs. Bhutto’s spokesperson.
But imagine the extent of damage it might have done to her credentials
in the eyes of important segments of the Pakistani people. I am one
of those Pakistanis who were certainly disappointed.
As for Pakistan’s
national security community, its fears about Mrs. Bhutto’s style
of foreign policy were reconfirmed on 22 December, when she revealed
too much while trying to prove her credentials to an Indian audience
during an interview that she requested with India’s Outlook magazine.
Mrs. Bhutto
sought this opportunity to rebut earlier remarks by India’s national
security adviser, Mr. M. K. Narayanan. The Indian official had implied
that India could not trust Mrs. Bhutto back in power because of what
he said were her “unfulfilled promises to New Delhi in 1988.”
This is how
Mrs. Bhutto responded, as published by the Indian magazine:
“Does
anyone remember those times or is public memory so short that no one
recalls the extremely difficult conditions India faced during the Sikh
insurgency 20 years ago? India was in a complete mess. Does anyone remember
that it was I who kept my promise to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi when
we met and he appealed to me for help in tackling the Sikhs? Has India
forgotten December 1988? Have they forgotten the results of that meeting
and how I helped curb the Sikh militancy? When I was prime minister
you did not have the Mumbai bomb blasts, you did not have the attack
on Parliament. There was no Kargil.”
In short,
Mrs. Bhutto pinned the entire blame for a whole range of complex issues
on her own country, Pakistan, essentially strengthening the arguments
of many of her detractors who insisted for years that she was a ‘security
risk’ for her own country, prone to defending everyone’s
case in the world except her own homeland’s: Pakistan.
If there
is anyone out there who thinks Mrs. Bhutto did not increase the number
of her enemies because of things she has been saying recently, and which
also happened to match many of Washington’s interests in this
region, please read this unedited comment that I received by e-mail
from a Pakistani blogger who commented on this last interview by Mrs.
Bhutto to an Indian magazine. Please note the hostility in his tone
and then note the anger directed at Mr. Musharraf for entering into
a ‘deal’ with her:
“Benazir
always deferred to India’s interests when she was the Prime Minister.
That much is well known. But that she is proud of it and wants to be
rewarded for it with appointment yet again as the PM, is amazing. By
whom? By the other servant of India – Musharraf.”
NOW WHAT?
All of this
should make it clear that, in addition to the terrorists who committed
this naked act of terrorism against a Pakistani politician, certain
policy circles in Washington D.C. bear equal moral responsibility for
this tragedy.
They are
responsible for the way they pushed Pakistan into a political mess,
first by forcibly parachuting Mrs. Bhutto into Pakistan at a time when
American support for any politician is a kiss of death. And then by
encouraging her on to a path of confrontation with the political elite
in Islamabad [The famous list accusing three prominent Pakistani personalities
of wanting to kill her, which was prepared even before her return to
Pakistan. And now we learn, courtesy CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, there
was a fourth name in the list: Mr. Musharraf himself.]
Washington’s
manipulation of Mrs. Bhutto’s political moves in the past year,
and the joint U.S.-U.K. pressures to redesign domestic Pakistani politics,
coupled with intense, mostly U.S. media blitz against Islamabad, all
of this has led to creating an unprecedented environment of domestic
instability in Pakistan. Political pundits in Washington would be wise
to question whether it was wise to do this when the Pakistanis were
facing off with their own demons on the border with Afghanistan.
I am just
one of many Pakistani observers who warned their government to be careful
about how some U.S. media reports were openly talking about the ‘risks’
facing Mrs. Bhutto on her return to Pakistan. It wasn’t hard to
figure out that, if anything happened to Mrs. Bhutto, it would be used
to increase the media ‘siege’ around Pakistan and ensure
a government in Islamabad that compromised on issues like the Pakistani
strategic arsenal and Islamabad’s interests in the region and
in Afghanistan.
In an earlier
column of mine [The Plan To Topple Pakistan Military, 19 Nov.], I wrote:
“Some
Pakistani security analysts privately say that American ‘chatter’
about Musharraf or Bhutto getting killed is a serious matter that can’t
be easily dismissed. Getting Bhutto killed can generate the kind of
pressure that could result in permanently putting the Pakistani military
on a back foot, giving Washington enough room to push for installing
a new pliant leadership in Islamabad fully backed by the West.”
Already,
we have seen a special U.N. Security Council session to discuss the
security situation in Pakistan. This adds to very deliberate attempts
in the U.S. media over the past few months to demonize Pakistan and
prepare the world opinion for a possible military intervention in Pakistan
on the lines of Afghanistan and Iraq.
This is why
the Pakistani delegation at the U.N. wanted to take out some lines from
the draft Security Council resolution passed yesterday after Mrs. Bhutto’s
assassination that appeared to be interfering too much in a domestic
Pakistani security concern. After all, we didn’t see the Security
Council using similar wording when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was
assassinated in Israel in 1995. Needless to say, the Pakistani concern
was not heeded.
Pakistani
officials will have to be careful about undue interference in Pakistani
internal matters under the pretext of this recent tragedy, especially
insinuations that Pakistani investigators somehow may not be capable
to deal with this crime.
Not that
Islamabad is taking any of this interference lightly. Pakistan has refused
to allow election observers from the Commonwealth into the country due
to this British organization’s arrogant bullying and interference
in domestic Pakistani affairs.
At the same
time, Pakistan’s security and stability must come above anything
else for all Pakistanis. This column might sound harsh to some, considering
the occasion. But this ‘background blunt talk’ is necessary
because of the enormity of this tragedy. Pakistan has not only lost
a leading and charismatic politician, we have also received a severe
blow to our stability.
As for the
terrorists behind this cowardly assassination, we have a battle with
Al Qaeda to fight, and a battle with whomever is exploiting the situation
in Afghanistan to destabilize Pakistan. Differences of political opinion
among Pakistanis should not turn violent. As a vibrant nation, we thrive
on our diversity.
Like millions
of Pakistanis today, I join the family of the slain former Prime Minister
of my country in their, and Pakistan’s, hour of grief.
Mr.
Quraishi is a Pakistani political commentator. He hosts a talk
show on PTV Network. He can be reached at [email protected]
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