Analysis:
Why Pakistan and the death of Benazir Bhutto are important
Bhutto in 1987, with husband Asif Ali Zardari.
BY ROSEMARY REGELLO
Few Americans lie in bed at night mulling over the fortunes of Pakistan. This is a mistake. The sixth most populous nation in the world also happens to be the principle spawning ground for the Islamic jihad. and the site of one of CIA's largest field offices in the world. And yet our long-term relationship with the Pakistani intelligence services - known as the ISI - has yielded unexpected results. A CBS News correspondent reported in 2001 that on the morning of the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden was receiving kidney dialysis in a military hospital in Rawalpindi.
Conspiracy theorists note that General Mahmoud Ahmad, who heads the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligency, was enjoying breakfast with the chairs of the U.S. Senate and House intelligence committees on the morning of September 11th. An FBI document would later implicate the general in the wire transfer of $100,000 to lead hijacker Mohammad Atta. On September 13th, Pakistan was awarded $10 billion in U.S. aid, ostensibly to fight al Qaida.
Despite the generous payday, Pakistan has continued to provide a safe haven for the jihadists. President Pervez Musharraf claims in his autobiography that U.S. National Security Advisor Richard Armitage warned in 2001 that the nation would be “bombed back to the stone age” if he didn’t cooperate in the War on Terrorism. If anything, al Qaida is an even larger operation that it was before September 11th. Much to the chagrin of his people, Musharraf has ceded territory in the country's Northwest Frontier province to the Taliban and its various tribal affiliates. While 400 alleged Taliban terrorists were rotting away in Guantanamo, the actual Taliban were busy rebuilding their war machine, eventually re-infilrating Afghanistan in 2004. In addition to attacking NATO forces, the Taliban have turned a handsome profit on opium cultivation in the besiegd country. According to a U.N. report, last year's harvest accounted for an astounding 92 percent of the world's heroin trade.
Perhaps to keep up appearances, General Musharraf has sent troops into the Frontier Province from time to time to combat the Islamic militant bases. The soldiers involved in these campaigns are frequently captured by the militants and held hostage, sometimes even beheaded. On October 8th, Musharaff's air force attacked an open-air shopping market and left dead 250 people, mostly civilians. Undeterred, the jihadists took control of the Swat Valley, a favorite spot for mountain climbers and other tourists, just 90 miles outside of Pakistan's capitol. A mass exodus of area inhabitants is now underway as the Taliban close girls' schools and set about implementing Sharia Law.
In spite of such a remarkable failure by General Musharraf to address Islamic extremism with the more than ample funding of the American government, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and other State Department officials still characterize him' as an "'indispensable" ally to American interests. Rice claims the general has turned over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11th atttacks, and other senior al Qaeda leaders to U.S. military authorities. Unfortunately, none of these men have been brought to the United States, charged and prosecuted for any crime, either by military tribunal or civilian court.
Although U.S. military aid continues to flow into Pakistan, a reform-minded former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, has returned to the nation after spending eight years in exile. Bhutto is a beloved icon who commands significant backing from the population, a fact that becomes evident whenever she appears in public. Her two previous administrations were sacked by a coalition of wealthy aristocrats and military leaders who accused her of corruption - charges which are as widely disputed as they are parroted by the western media. During her time in office, Bhutto shut down the principle Islamic university in Peshawar and turned over a key terrorist, the Blind Sheik, to U.S. authorities. (The Sheik was tried and convicted here in 1993.) Not surprisingly, two bombs exploded alongside Bhutto's welcome-home convoy this October 18th, killing over 130 supporters. Although she and her husband escaped without injury, the road to re-election next January remains a rocky one.
On November 4th, Musharaff declared a state of emergency, dismissing the country's judiciary and arresting thousands of opposition leaders, lawyers, human rights advocates and journalists. Citing the threat of Islamic extremists as the reason for the declaration, the general has surrounded Bhutto's home in Lahore with 1,000 policemen and forbidden public rallies in advance of election season. Bhutto told reporters that she was concerned about the prospect of vote-rigging in the coming election. (The state of emergency was lifted in December.)
Daughter of Destiny
In the fall of 1963, Benazir Bhutto, aged 10, remembers being awakened in the private train car of the foreign minister of Pakistan during a trip across the country. “This is no time to sleep,” he said urgently. “There has been a great tragedy. The young president of the United States has been shot.”
It was her own father speaking. The nation he represented had been created less than two decades earlier, in 1947, from the carve-up of the British Empire. The Muslim half of Colonial India declared independence from the Hindus, creating the country of Pakistan. In 1971, Pakistan would split again when the much-neglected, dirt-poor Bangladeshi people rebelled against the wealthier western provinces.
The people of Kashmir, which is situated between India and Pakistan, would also also aspired for independence, but never got the chance. In 1947, India sent in troops to occupy the region and a promised plebiscite was never held. Sixty years later, the occupation remains a source of tension between the two nuclear powers.
The Bhutto family hails from the Pakistani province of Sindh. Benazir is related to the king of tribe, whose roots trace back to antiquity. Through the centuries, the Bhuttos have cultivated vast agricultural tracts along the Indus River. In 1958, some of the acreage was appropriated as part of land reform to help poor Pakistanis achieve self-sufficiency.
In the early 1970s, another land reform inititaive went to effect, this time instituted by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir’s father. Bhutto served in the cabinet of the country's second head of state, a military chief named Ayub Khan, for many years, and during the long stint as foreign minister, entertained a constant stream of international dignitaries. There were so many, in fact, that his wide-eyed eldest daughter could barely keep track of them all.
“When a limousine drove through the gates,” she recounts in her 1988 memoir, Daughter of Destiny, “we peered from the upstairs window to see President Ayub and an American gentleman enter 70 Clifton [the Bhutto residence in Karachi]. I recognized the American immediately from the films we had seen downtown. ‘Did you enjoy meeting Bob Hope,’ I nonchalantly asked my mother the next morning. ‘Who?’ my mother asked. ‘Bob Hope’ I said. ‘You silly,’ she said to me. ‘That was the vice-president of the United States, Hubert Humphrey.’”
After a disastrous war with India in 1971, Bhutto’s father broke with the nation’s second military dictator, Yahya Khan, and formed the Pakistani Peoples Party (PPP), which still exists today. A democratic election followed and Bhutto became the country's first prime minister in 1973. Not long afterward, he and Benazir traveled to India to resolve remaining issues concerning the recent conflict. It was here that she met Indira Gandhi, a stately, poker-faced woman who eventually called her father into a private meeting when the talks were going nowhere. When the two heads of state re-emerged, they announced that India would return much of the territory it captured from Pakistan
Gandhi had bestowed a huge gift on Pakistan, hoping to foster better relations in the future. Ali Bhutto returned home a hero.
But for the U.S. State Department and the assassination of Gandhi, the ensuing decades might have turned out much differently. The popular prime minister of Pakistan was a graduate from U.C. Berkeley and Oxford, one of the first men of his generation to study in the West. It didn't hurt that he married a savvy, cosmopolitan Iranian woman named Nusrat Isphahani, who gave him four children. However, according to Benazir, one evening in 1976 her father confided to her that Henry Kissinger had just threatened him over dinner. The former secretary of state under Nixon warned Bhutto that if he didn’t cancel a contract with France to build a nuclear power plant, he would be made into a “horrible example”. The prime minister was “flushed with anger” when he arrived home that night, she recalls in her book.
“Now I couldn’t erase that conversation from my mind, even though Jimmy Carter had taken office as president… and Cyrus Vance, not Henry Kissinger, was now secretary of state. But changes in the U.S. administration did not necessarily mean changes in all the U.S. centers of power. From my seven years of government studies I knew that the CIA was often autonomous and that their policies were not established overnight.”
Those seven years of college included four at Harvard, where she graduated with honors. (Her father refused her permission to attend his own alma mater at Berkeley, explaining, ‘The weather in California is too nice. The snow and ice in Massachusetts will force you to study.”) Benazir went on to attend Oxford, where she became the first Asian woman to head the elite debating society.
In 1977, not long after Kissinger’s threat, Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan accused Prime Minister Bhutto of corruption. Several PPP officials were assassinated and the clerics called for a general strike, hoping to destabilize the government. The general public ignored the call and voted for Bhutto and the PPP in a landslide during in the next election. That left Pakistan’s new military chief General Zia ul-Haq to toss his hat in the ring, declaring a state of emergency and deposing Bhutto in a coup.
The prime minister’s younger two sons escaped before the army could detain them, but Bhutto, his wife and two daughters were thrown into prison. A former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, General Zia had close ties to the Islamic fundamentalist movement, which the CIA and U.S. State Department had been courting since the 1950s. At the same time the Ayatollah Khomenie was maneuvering to wrest control of Iran after a popular uprising removed the U.S. backed shah from power, Zia was implementing Sharia Law in Pakistan.
In 1979, Zia executed Ali Bhutto after a sham trial in which Bhutto was accused of murdering a political opponent.
When the Reagan Administration took office in 1980, far from condemning the military dictatorship, it asked for and received permission from Congress to send hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid to Pakistan. The Soviets had occupied Afghanistan and a protracted campaign was deemed necessary to drive them out. Osama bin Laden flew in from Saudi Arabia to help set up the war’s staging area along the Afghan border. The Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence became a key player during this era, acting as the CIAs handler of the various Islamic jihadist factions fighting in Afghanistan.
Benazir Bhutto, meanwhile, languished in prison until 1983. Like her mother and sister, she was allowed to leave the country only when her deteriorating health caused a sufficient international outcry against the U.S. backed Zia.
The general himself would not live to reap the fruit of his grim labors. In 1987, a mysterious plane crash left him dead, along with many of his top officers and the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan. Although the cause of the crash was never determined, by then Pakistan’s first free elections in a decade were scheduled. Benazir Bhutto returned from exile to run for the position her father last held. She and the PPP won easily and immediately assumed control of the parliament. On December 1, 1988, at the age of 35 she became the world’s first female prime minister of a Muslim country.
Voting in the 1988 election.
Paying Off the Debts of a Murderer
It's interesting to note that whenever Pakistan has been ruled by a dictatorship, money from the international banks and the United States has rained down on the country in buckets. When Democratic administrations preside, the bill collectors come to call.
Benazir Bhutto discovered this unfortunate political reality soon after taking office. With the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan, the CIA drew down its covert Afghan operation in Islamabad, leaving the new head of state in the position of having to pay back billions of dollars in loans made to the man who murdered her father.
(In Liberia, President Ellen John-Sirleaf found herself in a similar position in 2006. There, the banks demanded payment on loans made to the brutal dictator Samuel Doe and war criminal Charles Taylor. In our September 2006 article about her, Sirleaf described that debt as “beyond the relm of comprehension”.)
Although Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto attended a state dinner held in her honor at the White House, the first President Bush used the old “nuclear ambitions” excuse to cut off foreign aid to her administration. He even imposed economic sanctions. This was a bitter pill to swallow for most Pakistanis given the blood, sweat and tears they had shed to help America win the Cold War against Russia. The relationship with the United States appeared to resemble that of Cinderella and her Stepmother, as Bhutto struggled to make the World Bank and IMF loan payments. In the face of austerity measures imposed by the international banking institutions, Islamic militants enjoyed a recruiting bonanza and Islamic universities and training camps shot up along the border with Afghanistan.
In 1990, after Bhutto failed to jumpstart the economy, the country’s president, Farooq Leghari, dissolved her government with the backing of the supreme court. Wealthy landowners were accused of plotting against Bhutto for her efforts to institute another land reform to relieve some of the nation’s grinding poverty. In numerous press dispatches, Bhutto was described as both incompetent and corrupt.
Not everyone, however, agreed with that determination. In 1994, as the head of the PPP, Bhutto was elected to a second term as prime minister. By then, the Pakistani Inter-Intelligence Services (ISI), had created a new army of Islamic jihadists known as the Taliban, which means "students", along the border of Afghanistan. Outfiteed with shoulder-to-air missile launchers, AK-47s, and other high-tech hardware, the Taliban quickly subdued the rival warlords in Afghanistan and captured Afghanistan. Despite its implementation of draconian laws, including a prohibition on girls attending school and loss of legal right for women, the United Nations recongnized the Taliban government and the United States provided economic aid.
Back in Pakistan, Bhutto took a hard line on the extremists, shutting down the Islamic university in Peshawar and later handing over terrorist Ramsi Yusef to the FBI. Yusef was one of the planners of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Towers.
During his time in Pakistan, the Blind Sheik, as he was known, tried to assassinate Bhutto twice. As in the case of her father, the Islamic fundamentalists failed to unseat her, leaving it for General Musharraf, now head of the military, to depose her on charges of corruption in 1996. In 1999, the year before the U.S. presidential election, Musharraf deposed another prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, a former supporter of General Zia. Now Musharraf declared himself the head of state.
According to some conspiracy theorists, this is where things get interesting. In 2001, according to FBI documents, General Mahmoud Ahmad, the head of the ISI, wired $100,000 to Mohammad Atta, the lead hijacker in the September 11th attacks. On September 9th, General Mahmoud is also thought to have ordered the assassination of Shah Masood, the head of the Afghan Northern Alliance, a coalition of local armies fighting to oust the Taliban from Kabul. Had Masood still been alive when the Americans invaded the nation in 2002, he would have almost certainly been elected President of Afaghanistan. Instead, a Unocal oil consultant named Hamid Karzai was installed after a fair and free election in which he was the only major candidate. Karzai had no previous experience in public office and was unknown within the country prior to the U.S. occupation.
As tangential as all this may sound, Canadian economist Michel Chossudovsky says it proves the CIA was likely complicit or at least knew in advance about the plot to attack the World Trade Towers on September 11th. In fact, General Mahmoud was in Washington, D.C. having breakfast with the heads of the House and Senate intelligence committees on the morning of the attacks. President Bush later appointed one of these men, Porter Goss, to head the CIA when George Tenet resigned in 2005. According to Chossudovsky, Mahmoud's visit to Washington began September 4th and ended September 13th.
The ISI is accused by Amnesty International of rounding up innocent Muslim men in 2002 to form much of the prisoner base at Guantanamo Bay. A recent report from the agency states that the CIA paid a bounty of $5,000 per head to ISI agents who simply declared the men terrorists and handed them over to U.S. authorities without any due process or legal proceeding. The ISI was also linked - albeit indirectly - to the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
“So it really worries me,” Bhutto explained to Margaret Warner of PBS this past August, “that there are all these people, from the top of my country right down to the shores of the Arabian ocean, who keep blocking the process of stemming terrorism." Lacking the votes in parliament to win a third term as president, General Musharraf met with Bhutto repeatedly over the course of a year to allow her back in Pakistan in return for the PPP's participation in the presidential vote in parliament.
“And what we're negotiating for” Bhutto told Warner, “are certain changes that will empower the parliament to take on the militants, without being destabilized by elements of the security apparatus, who do not wish to see the terrorists and the extremists contained. Without the redefinition of the powers, I don't think the Pakistan People's Party would be interested in coming up just as a decoration piece.”
Nudging a Dictator into Retirement
On October 5th, Bhutto’s party allowed a the vote in which Musharraf won a third term as president. While no one in the PPP voted for him, its participation provided the necessary quorum. The right-wing Islamic parties all boycotted.
Nevertheless, Bhutto would subsequently come under fire from even high-ranking members of her own party for what was widely described as a power-sharing arrangement with Musharraf brokered by the U.S. State Department. Bhutto countered that the best way to transition to democracy was to ease a military dictator out of office, rather than throw down the gauntlet.
She's seen enough protests end in bloodshed to opt for less confrontational tactics whenever that choice is made available. During an appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations on August 11th, she was asked if she had any regrets about her previous terms in office. “I think, as one of the first female, woman prime ministers in a Muslim world and one of the first group of women leaders on the world stage, I was so concerned with trying to appear as tough as a man and as strong as a man, and to judge myself to be a good leader by such decision," she replied. "I should have been true to myself. The people wanted me to be there as a woman leader, somebody who was more nurturing, who could take care of our people, our women, our children, redress their needs, build them hostels and schools and provide them with basic nutrition. I wish I had focused more on that than on the more militaristic notions.”
In an interview at the time with the Washington Post, Council fellow Daniel Markey said, "She's playing a pretty dangerous game, with the potential that it could backfire on her."
Bhutto has stated publicly that if she and the PPP take control of the parliament in January, she plans to order the country's armed forces to recapture all the territory taken by al Qaeda and the Taliban. She also plans to go after drug cartels directing the opium trade in Afghanistan. Most of these crime syndicates are headquartered in the Northwest Province and are thought to be providing the operating budget for the jihad that has been burgeoning throughout the the Middle East and Central Asia during President George W. Bush's two terms in office.. According to a U.N. assessment released earlier this year, Afghanistan now accounts for 92 percent of the world’s opium trade, with poppy cultivation reaching a staggering 165,000 hectares in 2006. It was the largest crop recorded in the history of the war-torn country, even though it has been occupied by U.S. and NATO forces since 2002.
British military spokesmen claim eradicating poppy harvests would undermine the effort to win the hearts and minds of Afghan peasants, hence their mostly hands-off policy. A CNN report in October said only about 10 percent of the crops are destroyed each year per an agreement with the Karzai government.
According to another report, this one issued by the International Crisis Group (ICG) last March, Islamic militancy has proliferated in Pakistan since the Bush Administration announced its $10 billion aid package in 2001. “More than five years after President Pervez Musharraf declared his intention to crack down on violent sectarian and jihadi groups and to regulate the network of madrasas (religious schools) on which they depend,” the ICG alleges, “his government’s reform program is in shambles. Banned sectarian and jihadi groups, supported by networks of mosques and madrasas, continue to operate openly in Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, and elsewhere.”
The report continues: “The prospects for breaking the links between the madrasa sector and violent extremism would increase if the national elections this year are democratic, free and fair. If they are, it is likely that the religious parties will be marginalized and the national-level moderate parties – with much greater political will to enact meaningful reforms – returned to power.”
Bhutto told the Council on Foreign Relations audience that if elected, she will implement a recommendation by the ICG to more carefully regulate the public school system, banning sectarian, pro-jihad, and anti-minority teaching curriculums.
Meanwhile, the role played by the U.S. State Department and CIA in Pakistan remains unclear. When Musharraf first moved to declare martial law on August 8th, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice intervened and talked him out of it, according to news reports. In late September, Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte was dispatched to Islamabad for a “strategic dialogue” with Pakistani officials.
If the name Negroponte sounds familiar, this is the same gentleman who served as the U.S. ambassador to Honduras during the Reagan Administration's Contra war against Nicaragua in the 1980s. Truth commission inquiries into that dark episode revealed that Negroponte played a key role in directing the illegal mercenary group in mounting attacks across the border. The raids resulted in mostly civilian casualties, included many rapes, kidnappings and the murder of an American electrical contractor named Ben Linder. When President Bush nominated Negroponte as his new Director of National Intelligence in 2005, several catholic nuns appeared at the confirmation hearing to vigorously protest the appointment. Negroponte was confirmed. Today he serves as the second highest official in the foreign service after Secretary of State Rice.
All of which suggests that if anyone’s lying up at night mulling over the future, it’s probably Benazir Bhutto. Over the years, both her brothers have been murdered and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari was imprisoned for 11 years under Musharaff without trial. (Charges of corruption against both Bhutto and her husband have never been proven.) Her three children have remained safe and are living in Dubai or London. Her eldest son attends Oxford University.
------------------------------------
“As a moderate, progressive, democratically elected woman prime minister of Pakistan, I was a threat to the fundamentalist zealots on multiple levels and targeted by them in both my governments. They had the support of sympathetic elements within Pakistan's security apparatus and the financial support of people like Osama Bin Laden. [who] personally spent over $10 million in late 1989 in support of a motion of no confidence to topple my government. And ultimately, with the active support of elements of the Pakistani military, my two democratically elected governments were sacked and elections rigged to ensure that my party would not return to power. Beware the power of zealots who are well-funded, well-armed, and supported by elements of your own government!” --Benazir Bhutto
From a commentary published in Slate Magazine, the month following the September 11th terrorist attacks.
Copyright 2007 - TheCityEdition.com
