Entries from December 1, 2007 - January 1, 2008
Bhutto: The Leader of the Poor
Munaeem
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via Boston.com : The true colors of Benazir Bhutto
Bhutto revealed her true colors during an interview when she was asked whether she would travel second class as leader of the opposition under the Nawaz Sharif government's austerity measures
In fury, the "people's representative" asked the interviewer if he knew who she was, who her grandfather was, and stated that she was a Bhutto, not an ordinary person, and that Bhuttos never traveled second class. Autocratic to the last, she willed ownership of her "populist" political party.
Benazir: The democrat
Benazir is being eulogised in the foreign and local media as the champion of democracy despite the fact that she failed miserably two times when she became the Prime Minister of the Country. Her governments were dismissed on the charges of gross corruption and extra judicial killings of political opponents. The champion of democracy has bequeathed the party leadership to his huband who was dubbed by the Pakistani press as Mr. 10 per cent when Benazir was in power. He was known to get 10 per cent in every government cotract and large business deals. It was unfortunate that he has become the co-chairman of the party. Has Benazir being a democrat her successor would have been chosen democratically. There were other qualified and deserving people in the party such as Makhdoom Amin Fahim and Aitezaz Ahsan.
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Former play boy and polo star chosen to lead Pakistan People Party
Pakistan People Party chose her slain leader's son and husband to lead the party. It is shocking that PPP chose a man to lead the party, who is known more for his playboy image than his intellect or politics.
This former play boy and polo star gained notoriety in the Pakistani and international press for taking commission and kickbacks from government contractors during the government of his wife.Michael Hirsh commented on Zardari in his article 'A family affair?' in the Newsweek this way:
Even so, given Bilawal's youth, the role of her husband will no doubt be controversial within the party and in the politics of the country. Zardari is a former playboy and polo star who was labeled "Mr. 10 Percent" in the Pakistani press because of the commissions and kickbacks he allegedly demanded from contractors doing business with the Pakistani government. He is widely blamed for the tangle of corruption that strangled and cut short Bhutto's two terms in office.
The Party Central committee should have chosen Mr. Fahim to lead the party because he deserves it. But these opportunists chose Zardari and his son to cash in on Benazir Bhutto’s death. Let us see if they can pull votes in country where families and feudal loyalties plays important role in election.
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Pakistan's flawed and feudal princess
Benazir Bhutto was a courageous, secular and liberal woman. But sadness at the demise of this courageous fighter should not mask the fact that as a pro-Western feudal leader who did little for the poor, she was as much a central part of Pakistan's problems as the solution to them.
William Dalrymple
Sunday December 30, 2007
The Observer
It's wrong for the West simply to mourn Benazir Bhutto as a martyred democrat, says this acclaimed south Asia expert. Her legacy is far murkier and more complex
One of Benazir Bhutto's more dubious legacies to Pakistan is the Prime Minister's house in the middle of Islamabad. The building is a giddy, pseudo-Mexican ranch house with white walls and a red tile roof. There is nothing remotely Islamic about the building which, as my minder said when I went there to interview the then Prime Minister Bhutto, was 'PM's own design'. Inside, it was the same story. Crystal chandeliers dangled sometimes two or three to a room; oils of sunflowers and tumbling kittens that would have looked at home on the Hyde Park railings hung below garishly gilt cornices.
The place felt as though it might be the weekend retreat of a particularly flamboyant Latin-American industrialist, but, in fact, it could have been anywhere. Had you been shown pictures of the place on one of those TV game-shows where you are taken around a house and then have to guess who lives there, you may have awarded this hacienda to virtually anyone except, perhaps, to the Prime Minister of an impoverished Islamic republic situated next door to Iran.
Which is, of course, exactly why the West always had a soft spot for Benazir Bhutto. Her neighbouring heads of state may have been figures as unpredictable and potentially alarming as President Ahmadinejad of Iran and a clutch of opium-trading Afghan warlords, but Bhutto has always seemed reassuringly familiar to Western governments - one of us. She spoke English fluently because it was her first language. She had an English governess, went to a convent run by Irish nuns and rounded off her education with degrees from Harvard and Oxford.
'London is like a second home for me,' she once told me. 'I know London well. I know where the theatres are, I know where the shops are, I know where the hairdressers are. I love to browse through Harrods and WH Smith in Sloane Square. I know all my favourite ice cream parlours. I used to particularly love going to the one at Marble Arch: Baskin Robbins. Sometimes, I used to drive all the way up from Oxford just for an ice cream and then drive back again. That was my idea of sin.'
It was difficult to imagine any of her neighbouring heads of state, even India's earnest Sikh economist, Manmohan Singh, talking like this.
For the Americans, what Benazir Bhutto wasn't was possibly more attractive even than what she was. She wasn't a religious fundamentalist, she didn't have a beard, she didn't organise rallies where everyone shouts: 'Death to America' and she didn't issue fatwas against Booker-winning authors, even though Salman Rushdie ridiculed her as the Virgin Ironpants in his novel Shame.
However, the very reasons that made the West love Benazir Bhutto are the same that gave many Pakistanis second thoughts. Her English might have been fluent, but you couldn't say the same about her Urdu which she spoke like a well-groomed foreigner: fluently, but ungrammatically. Her Sindhi was even worse; apart from a few imperatives, she was completely at sea.
English friends who knew Benazir at Oxford remember a bubbly babe who drove to lectures in a yellow MG, wintered in Gstaad and who to used to talk of the thrill of walking through Cannes with her hunky younger brother and being 'the centre of envy; wherever Shahnawaz went, women would be bowled over'.
This Benazir, known to her friends as Bibi or Pinky, adored royal biographies and slushy romances: in her old Karachi bedroom, I found stacks of well-thumbed Mills and Boons including An Affair to Forget, Sweet Imposter and two copies of The Butterfly and the Baron. This same Benazir also had a weakness for dodgy Seventies easy listening - 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree' was apparently at the top of her playlist. This is also the Benazir who had an enviable line in red-rimmed fashion specs and who went weak at the sight of marrons glace.
But there was something much more majestic, even imperial, about the Benazir I met when she was Prime Minister. She walked and talked in a deliberately measured and regal manner and frequently used the royal 'we'. At my interview, she took a full three minutes to float down the 100 yards of lawns separating the Prime Minister's house from the chairs where I had been told to wait for her. There followed an interlude when Benazir found the sun was not shining in quite the way she wanted it to. 'The sun is in the wrong direction,' she announced. Her hair was arranged in a sort of baroque beehive topped by a white gauze dupatta. The whole painted vision reminded me of one of those aristocratic Roman princesses in Caligula
This Benazir was a very different figure from that remembered by her Oxford contemporaries. This one was renowned throughout Islamabad for chairing 12-hour cabinet meetings and for surviving on four hours' sleep. This was the Benazir who continued campaigning after the suicide bomber attacked her convoy the very day of her return to Pakistan in October, and who blithely disregarded the mortal threat to her life in order to continue fighting. This other Benazir Bhutto, in other words, was fearless, sometimes heroically so, and as hard as nails.
More than anything, perhaps, Benazir was a feudal princess with the aristocratic sense of entitlement that came with owning great tracts of the country and the Western-leaning tastes that such a background tends to give. It was this that gave her the sophisticated gloss and the feudal grit that distinguished her political style. In this, she was typical of many Pakistani politicians. Real democracy has never thrived in Pakistan, in part because landowning remains the principle social base from which politicians emerge.
The educated middle class is in Pakistan still largely excluded from the political process. As a result, in many of the more backward parts of Pakistan, the feudal landowner expects his people to vote for his chosen candidate. As writer Ahmed Rashid put it: 'In some constituencies, if the feudals put up their dog as a candidate, that dog would get elected with 99 per cent of the vote.'
Today, Benazir is being hailed as a martyr for freedom and democracy, but far from being a natural democrat, in many ways, Benazir was the person who brought Pakistan's strange variety of democracy, really a form of 'elective feudalism', into disrepute and who helped fuel the current, apparently unstoppable, growth of the Islamists. For Bhutto was no Aung San Suu Kyi. During her first 20-month premiership, astonishingly, she failed to pass a single piece of major legislation. Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, killings and torture.
Within her party, she declared herself the lifetime president of the PPP and refused to let her brother Murtaza challenge her. When he persisted in doing so, he ended up shot dead in highly suspicious circumstances outside the family home. Murtaza's wife Ghinwa and his daughter Fatima, as well as Benazir's mother, all firmly believed that Benazir gave the order to have him killed.
As recently as the autumn, Benazir did and said nothing to stop President Musharraf ordering the US and UK-brokered 'rendition' of her rival, Nawaz Sharif, to Saudi Arabia and so remove from the election her most formidable rival. Many of her supporters regarded her deal with Musharraf as a betrayal of all her party stood for.
Behind Pakistan's endless swings between military government and democracy lies a surprising continuity of elitist interests: to some extent, Pakistan's industrial, military and landowning classes are all interrelated and they look after each other. They do not, however, do much to look after the poor. The government education system barely functions in Pakistan and for the poor, justice is almost impossible to come by. According to political scientist Ayesha Siddiqa: 'Both the military and the political parties have all failed to create an environment where the poor can get what they need from the state. So the poor have begun to look to alternatives for justice. In the long term, flaws in the system will create more room for the fundamentalists.'
In the West, many right-wing commentators on the Islamic world tend to see the march of political Islam as the triumph of an anti-liberal and irrational 'Islamo-fascism'. Yet much of the success of the Islamists in countries such as Pakistan comes from the Islamists' ability to portray themselves as champions of social justice, fighting people such as Benazir Bhutto from the Islamic elite that rules most of the Muslim world from Karachi to Beirut, Ramallah and Cairo.
This elite the Islamists successfully depict as rich, corrupt, decadent and Westernised. Benazir had a reputation for massive corruption. During her government, the anti-corruption organisation Transparency International named Pakistan one of the three most corrupt countries in the world.
Bhutto and her husband, Asif Zardari, widely known as 'Mr 10 Per Cent', faced allegations of plundering the country. Charges were filed in Pakistan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States to investigate their various bank accounts.
When I interviewed Abdul Rashid Ghazi in the Islamabad Red Mosque shortly before his death in the storming of the complex in July, he kept returning to the issue of social justice: 'We want our rulers to be honest people,' he said. 'But now the rulers are living a life of luxury while thousands of innocent children have empty stomachs and can't even get basic necessities.' This is the reason for the rise of the Islamists in Pakistan and why so many people support them: they are the only force capable of taking on the country's landowners and their military cousins.
This is why in all recent elections, the Islamist parties have hugely increased their share of the vote, why they now already control both the North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan and why it is they who are most likely to gain from the current crisis.
Benazir Bhutto was a courageous, secular and liberal woman. But sadness at the demise of this courageous fighter should not mask the fact that as a pro-Western feudal leader who did little for the poor, she was as much a central part of Pakistan's problems as the solution to them.
· William Dalrymple's latest book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, published by Bloomsbury, recently won the Duff Cooper Prize for History
Anglo-American Ambitions behind the Assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the Destabilization of Pakistan
It has been known for months that the Bush-Cheney administration and its allies have been manuevering to strengthen their political control of Pakistan, paving the way for the expansion and deepening of the “war on terrorism” across the region. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto does not change this agenda. In fact, it simplifies Bush-Cheney’s options.
Seeding chaos with a pretext
“Delivering democracy to the Muslim world” has been the Orwellian rhetoric used to mask Bush-Cheney’s application of pressure and force, its dramatic attempt at reshaping of the Pakistani government (into a joint Bhutto/Sharif-Musharraf) coalition, and backdoor plans for a military intervention. Various American destabilization plans, known for months by officials and analysts, proposed the toppling of Pakistan's military.
The assassination of Bhutto appears to have been anticipated. There were even reports of “chatter” among US officials about the possible assassinations of either Pervez Musharraf or Benazir Bhutto, well before the actual attempts took place.
As succinctly summarized in Jeremy Page’s article, "Who Killed Benazir Bhutto? The Main Suspects", the main suspects are 1) “Pakistani and foreign Islamist militants who saw her as a heretic and an American stooge”, and 2) the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, a virtual branch of the CIA. Bhutto’s husband Asif Ali Zardari directly accused the ISI of being involved in the October attack.
The assassination of Bhutto has predictably been blamed on “Al-Qaeda”, without mention of fact that Al-Qaeda itself is an Anglo-American military-intelligence operation.
Page’s piece was one of the first to name the man who has now been tagged as the main suspect: Baitullah Mehsud, a purported Taliban militant fighting the Pakistani army out of Waziristan. Conflicting reports link Mehsud to “Al-Qaeda”, the Afghan Taliban, and Mullah Omar (also see here). Other analysis links him to the terrorist A.Q. Khan.
Mehsud’s profile, and the reporting of it, echoes the propaganda treatment of all post-9/11 “terrorists”. This in turn raises familiar questions about Anglo-American intelligence agency propaganda involvement. Is Mehsud connected to the ISI or the CIA? What did the ISI and the CIA know about Mehsud? More importantly, does Mehsud, or the manipulation of the propaganda surrounding him provide Bush-Cheney with a pretext for future aggression in the region?
Classic “war on terrorism” propaganda
While details on the Bhutto assassination continue to unfold, what is clear is that it was a political hit, along the lines of US agent Rafik Harriri in Lebanon. Like the highly suspicious Harriri hit, the Bhutto assassination has been depicted by corporate media as the martyring of a great messenger of western-style “democracy”. Meanwhile, the US government’s ruthless actions behind the scenes have received scant attention.
The December 28, 2007 New York Times coverage of the Bhutto assassination offers the perfect example of mainstream Orwellian media distortion that hides the truth about Bush/Cheney agenda behind blatant propaganda smoke. This piece echoes White House rhetoric proclaiming that Bush’s main objectives are to “bring democracy to the Muslim world” and “force out Islamist militants”.
In fact, the openly criminal Bush-Cheney administration has only supported and promoted the antithesis of democracy: chaos, fascism, and the installation of Anglo-American-friendly puppet regimes.
In fact, the central and consistent geostrategy of Bush-Cheney, and their elite counterparts around the world, is the continued imposition and expansion of the manufactured “war on terrorism”; the continuation of war across the Eurasian subcontinent, with events triggered by false flag operations and manufactured pretexts.
In fact, the main tools used in the “war on terrorism” remain Islamist militants, working on behalf of Anglo-American military intelligence agencies---among them, “Al-Qaeda”, and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, the ISI. Mehsud fits this the same profile.
Saving Bush-Cheney’s Pakistan
In an amusing quote from the same New York Times piece, Wendy Chamberlain, former US ambassador to Pakistan (and a central figure behind multinational efforts to build a trans-Afghan pipeline, connected to 9/11), proudly states: “We are a player in the Pakistani political system”.
Not only has the US continued to be a “player”, but one of its top managers for decades.
Each successive Pakistani leader since the early 1990s---Bhutto, Sharif and Musharraf---have bowed to Western interests. The ISI is a virtual branch of the CIA.
While Musharraf has been, and remains, a strongman for Bush-Cheney, questions about his “reliability”, and control---both his regime’s control over the populace and growing popular unrest, and elite control over his regime---have driven Bush-Cheney attempts to force a clumsy (pro-US, Iraq-style) power-sharing government. As noted by Robert Scheer, Bush-Cheney has been playing “Russian roulette” with Musharraf, Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif---each of whom have been deeply corrupt, willing fronts for the US.
The return of both Bhutto and the other former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has merely been an attempt by the US to hedge its regional power bets.
What exactly were John Negroponte and Condoleeza Rice really setting up the past few months?
Who benefits from Bhutto’s murder?
The “war on terrorism” geostrategy and propaganda milieu, the blueprint that has been used by elite interests since 9/11 to impose a continuing world war, is the clear beneficiary of the Bhutto assassination. Bush/Cheney and their equally complicit pro-war/pro-occupation counterparts in the Democratic Party enthusiastically support the routine use of “terror” pretexts to impose continued war policies.
True to form, fear, “terrorism”, “security” and military force, are once again, the focuses of Washington political rhetoric, and the around-the-clock media barrage.
The 2008 US presidential candidates and their elite campaign advisers, all but a few of whom enthusiastically support the “war on terrorism”, have taken turns pushing their respective versions of “we must stop the terrorists” rhetoric for brain-addled supporters. The candidates whose polls have slipped, led by 9/11 participant and opportunist Rudy Guiliani, and hawkish neoliberal Hillary Clinton, have already benefited from a new round of mass fear.
Musharraf benefits from the removal of a bitter rival, but now must find a way to re-establish order. Musharraf now has an ideal justification to crack down on “terrorists” and impose full martial law, with Bush-Cheney working from the shadows behind Musharraf---and continuing to manipulate or remove his apparatus, if Musharraf proves too unreliable or broken to suit Anglo-American plans.
The likely involvement of the ISI behind the Bhutto hit cannot be overstated. ISI’s role behind every major act of “terrorism” since 9/11 remains the central unspoken truth behind current geopolitical realities. Bhutto, but not Sharif or Musharraf would have threatened the ISI’s agendas.
Bhutto, militant Islam, and the pipelines
Now that she has been martyred, many unflattering historical facts about Benazir Bhutto will be hidden or forgotten.
Bhutto herself was intimately involved in the creation of the very “terror” milieu purportedly responsible for her assassination. Across her political career, she supported militant Islamists, the Taliban, the ISI, and the ambitions of Western governments.
As noted by Michel Chossudovsky in America’s “War on Terrorism”, it was during Bhutto’s second term that Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) and the Taliban rose to prominence, welcomed into Bhutto’s coalition government. It was at that point that ties between the JUI, the Army and the ISI were established.
While Bhutto’s relationship with both the ISI and the Taliban were marked by turmoil, it is clear that Bhutto, when in power, supported both---and enthusiastically supported Anglo-American interventions.
In his two landmark books, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia and Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia, Ahmed Rashid richly details the Bhutto regime’s connections to the ISI, the Taliban, “militant Islam”, multinational oil interests, and Anglo-American officials and intelligence proxies.
In Jihad, Rashid wrote:
“Ironically it was not the ISI but Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the most liberal, secular leader in Pakistan’s recent history, who delivered the coup de grace to a new relationship with Central Asia. Rather than support a wider peace process in Afghanistan that would have opened up a wider peace process in Afghanistan, Bhutto backed the Taliban, in a rash and presumptuous policy to create a new western-oriented trade and pipeline route from Turkmenistan through southern Afghanistan to Pakistan, from which the Taliban would provide security. The ISI soon supported this policy because its Afghan protégé Gulbuddin Hekmatyar had made no headway in capturing Kabul, and the Taliban appeared to be strong enough to do so.”
In Taliban, Rashid provided even more historical detail:
“When Bhutto was elected as Prime Minister in 1993, she was keen to open a route to Central Asia. A new proposal emerged backed strongly by the frustrated Pakistani transport and smuggling mafia, the JUI and Pashtun military and political officials.”
“The Bhutto government fully backed the Taliban, but the ISI remained skeptical of their abilities, convinced that they would remain a useful but peripheral force in the south.”
“The US congress had authorized a covert $20 million budget for the CIA to destabilize Iran, and Tehran accused Washington of funneling some of these funds to the Taliban---a charge that was always denied by Washington . Bhutto sent several emissaries to Washington to urge the US to intervene more publicly on the side of Pakistan and the Taliban.”
Bhutto’s one mistake: she vehemently supported the pipeline proposed by Argentinian oil company Bridas, and opposed the pipeline by Unocal (favored by the US). This contributed to her ouster in 1996, and the return of Nawaz Sharif to power. As noted by Rashid:
“After the dismissal of the Bhutto government in 1996, the newly elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, his oil minister Chaudry Nisar Ali Khan, the army and the ISI fully backed Unocal. Pakistan wanted more direct US support for the Taliban and urged Unocal to start construction quickly in order to legitimize the Taliban. Basically the USA and Unocal accepted the ISI’s analysis and aims---that a Taliban victory in Afghanistan would make Unocal’s job much easier and quicken US recognition.”
Her appealing and glamorous pro-Western image notwithstanding, Bhutto’s true record is one of corruption and accommodation.
The “war on terrorism” resparked
Every major Anglo-American geostrategic crime has been preceded by a convenient pretext, orchestrated and carried out by “terror” proxies directly or indirectly connected to US military-intelligence, or manipulated into performing as intelligence assets. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto is simply one more brutal example.
This was Pakistan’s 9/11; Pakistan’s JFK assassination, and its impact will resonate for years.
Contrary to mainstream corporate news reporting, chaos benefits Bush-Cheney’s “war on terrorism”. Calls for “increased worldwide security” will pave the way for a muscular US reaction, US-led force and other forms of “crack down” from Bush-Cheney across the region. In other words, the assassination helps ensure that the US will not only never leave, but also increase its presence.
The Pakistani election, if it takes place at all, is a simpler two-way choice: pro-US Musharraf or pro-US Sharif.
While the success of Bush-Cheney’s 9/11 agenda has met with mixed results, and it has met with a wide array of resistance (“terroristic” as well as political), there is no doubt that the propaganda foundation of the “war on terrorism” has remained firm, unshaken and routinely reinforced.
As for Nawaz Sharif, who now emerges as the sole competitor for Musharraf, he, like Musharraf and Bhutto, is legendary for his accommodation to Anglo-American interests---pipelines, trade, and the continued US military presence. As Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie noted in the book Forbidden Truth, the October 1999 military coup led by Musharraf that originally toppled Sharif’s regime was sparked by animosity between the two camps, as well as “Sharif’s personal corruption and political megalomania”, and “concerns that Sharif was dancing too eagerly to Washington’s tune on Kashmir and Afghanistan”.
In other words, Bush-Cheney wins, no matter which asset winds up on the throne.
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Who will be heir to Bhutto's throne?
Officially PPP's senior vice-chairman, Amin Fahim should succeed her. Some people are saying that he lacks the Bhutto charisma and surname.
Some Bhutto loyalists want to make her son Bilawal her heir. However, he lacks the surname too. He is not Bhutto. He is Zardari.
There are reports that Mumtaz Bhutto may now try to reclaim the throne. Murtaza’s son is also tipped to be a future political star.
Let us see who succeeds her.
Benazir Bhutto's party workers are carrying out arson attacks
Benazir Bhutto's party workers are carrying out arson attacks on government and private properties to avenge the death of their leader. They burnt down banks, telephone exchanges and cars. Washington Post reported that several PPP workers tried to burn a refinery near Hyderabad. But their attack was foiled by the law enforcement agencies. The clash between PPP workers and law enforcement agencies resulted in the death of two PPP works. The Washington Post reported:
Security forces shot dead two others among 400 PPP activists trying to break into an oilfield facility near Hyderabad, police said.
What the PPP workers are doing will plunge the province into crisis. If they continue to attack properties and people the other side will not remain silent and Sindhi’s will confined to the anterior of Sind. I urge the PPP high commands to restrain their workers . Otherwise things will go out of control.
Pakistan government's spoken claimed that Benazir Bhutto died of head injury.
Pakistan government's spoken claimed that Benazir Bhutto died of head injury. He said that the blast knocked her head into a lever attached to the sunroof, fracturing her skull.
Bhutto's spokeswoman Sherry Rehman, who was involved in washing her body for burial, told AFP that she saw bullet wounds. She said :
"There was a bullet wound I saw that went in from the back of her head and came out the other side."
It is the responsibility of the Pakistani government to clarify the matter. Otherwise , the country will descend into chaos.
Pakistan can descend into civil war
via CNNMoney.com:
Pakistan is barely a unitary state, riven by centuries-old ethnic and clan rivalries constantly refreshed by revenge. The Bhutto family's stronghold was the massive southern Sindh province, centered on the country's biggest and richest city, Karachi.
Punjabis have traditionally dominated government in Pakistan, civilian and military, and often in coalition with the Pashtuns of the fractious NorthWest Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan. For Sindh, the Bhuttos were always a rallying point. But with their "Daughter of the East" champion dead and the dynasty defeated, the isolated Sindhis and Bhutto-sympathizers could be out for revenge.
Any conflict will be fanned by Islamist extremists, including Al Qaeda, which will be blamed by many for today's atrocity -- although it could easily have been anyone; the government, the military, and even rivals within Bhutto's own party have had fingers pointed at them. A religious war is the West's worst nightmare and the situation will be enough to justify President-General Pervez Musharraf again declaring martial law, with Western acquiescence.
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Pakistan's Bhutto killed in attack
Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto died in a suicide attack. The attacked first shot her in the neck and then detonated the bomb, which killed several people.
After the attack she was taken to Rawalpindi General Hospital , where doctors pronounced her dead at 6:16 p.m.
Her party members are putting the responsibility of death on Mr. Musharraf. In my opinion, she died of her own stupidity. She broke her own security arrangement.
She stood up in her bullet proof car to wave at the crowd, which gave the killer a good opportunity to shoot her.
The man first fired at Bhutto's vehicle. She ducked and then he blew himself up," said police officer Mohammad Shahid.
US left Pakistan ‘defenceless’ : Kissinger’s ’76 remarks revealed
via Dawn:
WASHINGTON, Dec 25: The United States would also have built a nuclear bomb if it were in Pakistan’s position after India’s first nuclear test in 1974, according to former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.Mr Kissinger made these remarks while chairing a State Department meeting on July 9, 1976 to discuss former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s efforts to buy a nuclear reprocessing plant from France.The details of this meeting were released recently along with other secret documents from that period.
“What he wants is to build a bomb,” the-then under secretary of state Philip Habib tells the meeting while talking about Mr Bhutto’s intentions for acquiring a reprocessing plant.
“If you were in his place you would do the same thing,” Mr Kissinger responded. “I must say I have some sympathy for Bhutto in this,” he added.
“We are doing nothing to help him on conventional arms; we are going ahead and selling nuclear fuel to India even after they exploded a bomb and then for this little project we are coming down on him like a tonne of bricks.”
According to the documents, the meeting also discussed a joint proposal by the former Shah of Iran and Mr Bhutto to build a multinational nuclear reactor in Pakistan to be run jointly by the two countries. The proposal, however, was never implemented as Americans felt that this would enable both Iran and Pakistan to acquire nuclear technology.
“Gentlemen, there are few countries in the world which by necessity or choice are still allies of ours. There is something indecent about our always proving that we are strong by kicking our allies in the teeth,” he observed.
“The Pakistanis don’t even have the appearance of a credible defence. What they have asked for from us is piddling compared to what the Indians have. I don’t think it adds to the stature of the United States to force an ally to be defenceless.”
Mr Kissinger then explained how he planned to convince Mr Bhutto to give up his nuclear plan.
“First, the only way we are going to get him off this reprocessing plant is to give him a reactor … Secondly, we should tell him that we will take steps to enhance his conventional defence. We can’t tell Bhutto that he can’t have either a conventional or a nuclear defence. Non-proliferation is not our only objective in South Asia.”
Commenting on the balance of power between India and Pakistan, Mr Kissinger observed: “An imbalance is being created in which Pakistan is totally dependent on India. There is no question that we can break Pakistan’s back because they have made the mistake of allying themselves with us.”
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Afghanistan needs foreign troops for 10 years, says Karzai
Afghan President told Bild newspaper that his country needed foreign troops for another 10 years.
Mr. President, Your country does not need foreign troops. What Afghanistan needs is a reconstruction effort from the international community to give Afghan people a better life.
Do you release why the 100,000 Coalition and Afghan security forces in the region fail to bring peace in Afghanistan?
They are not here to provide relieve to Afghan people. They are there to keep an eye on China and Iran. They will keep Afghanistan under perpetual crisis to find a pretext for their presence. You can yourself see that failed to give the aid they pledged on different forums.
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Commentary: Billions in Aid to Pakistan Was Wasted, Officials Assert
David Rohde, Carlotta Gall, Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger writes in their article ‘Billions in Aid to Pakistan Was Wasted, Officials Assert’ that aid given to Pakistan was to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban,.
The smearing campaign started by US media, law makers and US officials will prove detrimental to American interests in the regions. The US forces will not be able to counter the onslaught of Taliban without the assistance of Pakistan.
Instead of bring the issue of Coalition Fund in the media; the US officials should have discussed those issues with Pakistan officials to sort the differences.
The US official must know that they are not in a position to dictate Pakistan anymore. We are witnessing a growing strategic relationship between Pakistan and China to counter the US hegemony in the region. I think they have affected controlled the disturbances created by India and Foreign agencies in the tribal regional of Pakistan
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Boucher says the Administration will provide aid to Pakistan
Richard Boucher, assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, said that new legislation would not impede the Bush Administration in providing assistance to Pakistan.
He was of the opinion that Pakistan would be able to met conditions set by the Congress.
The question is why the Administration is so worried to provide the money to Pakistan.
The Administration feels that of they did not provide the money to Pakistan. It will find alternate source. This will bad affect the US interests in the region and weaken its strategic position in the region.
I feel that rhetoric of the US law makers have drifted Pakistan to Chinese.